Three pallets of concrete (215mm x 215mm x 440mm ) blocks, a pallet of Blue
Circle cement bags and a ton of soft sand arrives today.
It is our first delivery of many, many pallets of concrete blocks to come!
It was amazing to see how far the Jewson’s delivery lorry managed to lift
each pallet over from our Loke, over the top of the stack of OSB sheets and
put them down actually in our “hole”! Wow!
After two days of rest to recover from the hectic episode of getting the
ready-mixed concrete in, we today, went out to cut slots in the slab to
“guide” cracks caused by the contraction of the drying and curing concrete.
The basic formula is 30mm for every 1mm thickness of the slab, which in our
case, the slab being 100mm thick, means that a series of slots is needed
every 3metres, so we cut 8 slots in total. We used a diamond coated cutting
disc (250mm diameter) in an angle grinder machine and cut 25mm deep slots.
Then we dismantled the framework that was holding the reinforcing rods in
place and put bright “lime” green domes on the ends of the sticking up steel
rods to protect us from potential accidents of falling over and piercing our
bodies right through, nasty or what!!
We now have an “avenue” of green “flowers” on steel stalks!!
While we were laying the concrete, we were occasionally kneeling on the wet concrete. Shaun was working on a particularly wet part and the concrete soaked through his knee pads (which are pretty much waterproof in normal usage). The concrete is quite alkaline and over time burned Shaun’s skin over his knee’s. He noticed they were feeling sore and I advised him to go and change clothes and wash off the concrete. He washed and changed and returned to work. At the end of the day it was obvious that he had burned knees quite badly.
Shauns-Cement-burned-Knees
We treated the burns with Alovera Gel and bandaged them.
Our ready mixed concrete duly arrived this morning, 8am sharp! We managed to
get our little extension chute installed on the dumper truck in time and
park it over by the Loke.
But when the concrete lorry arrived, he had only one extension chute himself
and wouldn’t or couldn’t reach our dumper truck. So we had to drive the
truck up onto the upper level, and only just managed to get their chute to
go into our skip!!
Anyway, it went reasonably smoothly after that, went back and forth a half
dozen times, distributing the concrete all the way along our trench. That
phase took 45minutes to empty his lorry load of concrete!
It then took us a further 7 hours to push and shove the piles of wet gravel
concrete into all the corners and in and around the re-bars, then chump it
down, level it off, and get a fairly flat finish. We couldn’t use the float
at the end as the mix had already set too hard by then.
Concrete poured and compacted
We stumbled and staggered back in doors after cleaning the dumper and
wheelbarrow plus tools with the garden hose, washed our gloves and overalls
of the worse of the cement. We had put on latex gloves underneath our tough
rubber coated gloves to protect our hands from the alkaline burns. Thanks
goodness!!
So at last, the swimming lane, currently 22.75metres long, now has a
foundation formed and it is now curing and hardening. All the reinforcing
rods are sticking out of the concrete, ready for the hollow concrete blocks
and we can then rebuild the ground up behind the soon to be new wall and
rebuild the fence again!!
The last 3 or 4 days has been very, very hectic getting everything ready!!
Phew! We will have a day or two off now to recover!!
The framework for holding the reinforcing bars in the correct positions, has
been constructed using our pile of 63mm CLS timber. We drove in pegs and
posts to hold the framework together and get the straight lines. this was done yesterday and Friday.
We then spent today (Sunday) mounting the re-bars themselves onto the “rails”,
positioned at every 225mm, which is the repeat distance between the holes in
the hollow concrete blocks.
And we used broken pieces of 50mm concrete paving slabs to stabilised the
steel rods in the bottom of the trench.
we didn’t finish this job until 10pm tonight!! we had to get this done before tomorrow and the arrival of the ready mixed concrete!! Phew!
Rebar Framing Ready
Rebar in Place
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!
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.
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.
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.
We had a bit of a disaster today when the rain came and came and came! It was one of those 10 year events of massive amount of water over hours and hours of rain, rain, rain!
We weren’t actually flooded out, nor anywhere near that point (ever since we have installed a whole line of Aquacell crates in front of our temporary living and storage buildings!), it just came up a few inches to create a shallow lake which disappeared fairly quickly, thanks for those aforementioned Aquacell modules underground!!
We are situated next to a garage mechanic workshop and car showroom, and their land is higher up than us (a good 4 feet!), and it slopes slightly downhill towards us too!! This means that we get some rain water flowing into our garden, but this turned into a gushing river during the heavy thunderstorm deluge and it ate the soil and dirt away from the concrete posts of the fence and our shoring panels!! The fence collapsed and our soil retaining wall broke under the strain of water logged soil. Our long trench hole we removed ready for the swimming lane, was filled with a slurry of soil and sand!!
Rain-and-soil-filled-trench
Rain-poured-in-here
Collapsed-fence
Broken-shuttering
We now have a foot deep of water along the whole length of our swimming lane and yes we wanted to have water in our swimming lane but just not right now!!