Test installation of the firepit in top void of the wall is successful. It was a little windy and too light to get the full effect in the photo, but is going to be great at night! Next up was to finished the pointing of the stone tiles on the…
One of the main jobs to do whilst out in France for a couple of weeks was to install the finished materials on the feature wall and render the other exposed concreate walls. A bit of a labour of love and definitely a family effort, it took around two days…
That is all of the work complete for this trip and with four concrete pours completed, 26.5m3 in total, it has been a real success, despite the little setback and upset at the formwork giving way on the first attempt. Sail-shade posts can be seen in place, but they are…
The biggest concrete pour of the build, with 14 cubic metres being poured using the long reach pump truck (28m arm). My daughter is tamping the concrete with the 2m metal bar to help bring the ‘cream’ to the top and sink any aggregate, leaving a nice smooth finish. The…
With the formwork off the front of the feature wall, we have been able to finish preparing the pool terrace slab for pouring. The walls of the pool and surrounding steps / retaining walls have all been tied together using rebar chemically set and tied to the wire sheets of…
Second time lucky! Almost every spare 10 minutes that I had this week was spent trying to find and implement ways to make the formwork for the feature wall stronger. This meant adding additional wooden braces at corners, extra pallets and blocks for support, etc. Glad to say all of…
Apart from adding additional support to the feature wall formwork, following the disaster on Monday, we have been busy getting the slab ready for pouring next week. My daughter has been busy laying membrane and then we have fitted the drains at the correct heights. S-Shaped spacers set the height…
Well that did not go very well at all… Whilst we thought there was enough support in the formworks, they gave way in two places. Both failed at the bottom and we lost lots of concrete as a result. Thankfully disaster was obverted and we ended up using concrete to…
With the school holiday coming to an end soon and the news that the concrete plant is now on a two week shut-down, that about completes the work that we can do for this trip. We will need to come back out soon, as we do not want to leave…
The suspended beam has now been started. The beam spans the width of the pool, under which a 100mm gap exists for the roller shutter to come through, a little like a letter box. Given that it is a suspended beam, spanning 4.5m, we got a structural engineer to do…