Things seem to be moving ahead so quickly! This week started with the foundations being filled with no less than 21 loads of building rubble. It was quite a feat to have the foundations levelled and filled in only three days, considering all the loading and unloading was done by hand.
The next two days were a hive of activity with 11 workers swarming around two concrete mixers. I am now starting to notice a few differences in the building progression from brick and mortar. Firstly, the slab is 100mm thick. With that depth of concrete, the slab starts to gain qualities of a raft foundation. A raft foundation is reinforced with steel, and it allows the foundation to move or “float” as the alternative name implies. Secondly, the strength of the concrete is 30 Mega Pascals (a normal slab is anything from 10 to 40 MPa), so the mix is on the strong side. Thirdly, the concrete slab lies on top of the brickwork, rather than being held in place by a row of bricks. This is because the steel frame will be erected on the edge of the slab, and the crumbly bricks will not be able to bear the weight of the steel. Wooden brackets were erected around the corners to hold the concrete, and were removed once the concrete had set.
I must add that Jo’burg water came to the party just in time. The water connection was in place for the mixing of the concrete, for which we are very grateful. Three cheers to our wonderful neighbours though, who kept us going for the first couple of weeks.
Our week ended on a real high: late in the afternoon, two enormous, twelve meter trucks rolled onto site with the first of our steel frames strapped on the trailers! My husband happened to be on site at the time, and I got an excited phone call to say that already, as the guys were unloading, he could make out parts of the house from the pre-assembled sections. This is awesome! A ready-made house! Two hours later the ground floor walls, joists, 2 000 screws, and 165kg of strapping had been neatly stacked on pallets in the front yard. Now while the concrete cures, the sorting can begin. Each pre-assembled section has been coded so that assembly is just one giant 3-D jigsaw puzzle, and our foreman has a map of how the whole lot fits together (kind of like holding the top of the puzzle box so that you know which pieces fit in the corners!)
While we wait in anticipation of the structure being assembled, I have renewed motivation to teach my two-year old how to do puzzles. One just never knows when these skills in life may come in handy…
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