We have ordered 4 cubic metres of ready mixed concrete for Monday 8am! The
price has gone up since 5 years ago and now is £425 for this load!! Yes, it
is not a full load of 6 cubic metres and therefore we must pay an ?empty?
charge to cover the cost of the driver and equipment but still, the price is
a shock!
Category: Build Progress
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Ready mix concrete ordered
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Re-Bars cut and bent!
Today, we started on the job of slicing up 55 6metres steel bars into 105
lengths of 2metres, and 100 lengths of 1metre.Then all were bent right angles, so that it would be buried in the concrete
slab and provide vertical reinforcing rods for the hollow blocks.
Pile of cut and Bent Re-Bar
Tomorrow, we will create the wooden framework to hold these rods in their
correct position. -
Foundation Trench Constructed!
We have finished constructing the foundation trench framework.
We put in about 8 tons of crushed builders rubble (maximum 75mm / 3inch
size) and then blinded the surface with clean sharp sand (about 1.5tons).All was compacted down several times for each layer.
This concludes the framework and now ready for the ready mixed concrete to
be poured in.
Base Dug out and Framed
Hardcore placed and compacted
Trench blinded with sand
But first, our next job is to cut the reinforcing bars into required lengths
and bent right angles for most of them. These are the vertical rods to be
placed around the edge of the foundation to line up with the block walls and
the hollows. A wooden support structure will hold the rods at the correct
level. -
Swimming Lane is Next to do
We have decided to start building the swimming lane first before the main house, because we had a serious problem with rain water this week, when we had very heavy rain falls gushing off the neighbours workshop and garage grounds.
So we are building a steel reinforced heavy duty block wall nearest the fence, this being the back wall of the swimming lane. Then we can rebuild the soil back up again to stabilised the ground so we can repair the fence itself too.
So the foundation is a 100mm thick concrete slab, set at the 9.200metre point (800mm below the nominal ground level), the first part of the wall will be made using 215mm wide concrete hollow blocks with steel 10mm reinforcing bars through all the holes and then ready mix concrete poured into each column to lock everything together.
The back wall is 6 blocks high (215mm each equals 1350mm high including mortar joints), which will put us above our ground level but still 500mm (at least!) below the neighbour’s soil level. For this, we will put another two layers of blocks but only using the narrower (140mm wide) hollow blocks because there is less weight and load of soil and also at this point, there is a “return” channel for the water to flow back down to the beginning and circulate around through the swimming lane. This is our natural filtration system for cleaning the water, using lots of water plants.
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The Massive Soil Works starts …
We start the huge task of sorting out the site, ready for the main house to be built upon!
The soil is a real mess of old garden rubbish, DIY waste and building rubble from the old little cottage, as well as old metal pipes used back in the days when the whole area was a market gardens plus clay sewage pipes running back and forth too!
We built a large sieve measuring 3feet by 2feet, with an electric powerful off-centre motor (taken from a plate ground compactor) to provide the shake and wiggle. this was mounted into a wooden rramework to hang over the top of the dumper truck to collect the “clean” dirt, to be taken away and tipped onto the mound of soil. The framework was then mounted on to the back of a large flat bed trollet to provide a collecting point for the rubbish and dumped into “ton bags”. These bags were lifted out when full and emptied into the skip.
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Structural Calculations with the Engineer
Finally, the structural calculations I have been performing over the last year have been submitted to our structural engineer. Paul Burrell visited us this morning
and I handed the calculations over to him. He seems impressed with the amount of work I have put into them…. Now we will have to find out if I have done them correctly.
It has been a long journey of discovery and learning, followed by a lot of calculations and drawings. The final report contains 168 pages and 20 A3 drawings! -
Waste disposal
Another of those inevitable expenses involved in demolition work is disposing of the waste. Now that the demolition is complete we have to get rid of all the waste. There is a lot of brick and concrete rubble and some general waste like carpets and other rubbish. The costs are not insignificant, a large skip for the general waste costs £135 (maybe 1.5Tons or £90/Ton) and the rubble costs £144 a lorry load (about 13 tons). But the metals make you money, disposing of the mesh from the rendering made us £30. The video show that it took 5 lorry loads to clear the rubble (£720! For about 60 Tons or £12/Ton). All those are cheap compared to disposing of the Asbestos cement panels from the house which cost £1037 for just 3.3 Tons (£315/Ton)! So all in all waste disposal has cost us 1037+720+135-30=£1862.
Grab lorry removing rubble.
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Chimney Demolition
We have now demolished the chimney stack, which was the last of the demolition tasks! We looked at the structure of the cimney and it was obvoius that it was originally designed for open wood burning fires, but was later retrofitted for burning coal.
The actuall demolition was quite easy using the mini-digger, as you can see from the movie.
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More demolition of the remaining structures.
Shaun has carried on his good work and demolished the outside loo and a old greenhouse.
