Garage roof up and house slab ready for pour

It has been some time since the last update and this is basically due to a lot of work being put into the house slab. From the last entry you could see that we had almost finished with the garage roof. The plan was to finalise this completely and then go onto the house slab, but we suddenly had days with really nice weather so we got going on doing all the sand, plastic, void formers (also called pods) and steel work for the slab. It was really important for us to have calm days for this so that nothing got destroyed in the process, so the garage roof was put off for some time.

With the house slab, the first we needed to do was to put the sand down to level the ground. Our concreters had been kind enough to visit us earlier with a laser level so that we could mark the level points on the box work. We then put up stringlines between the different points and used a 120 cm level in addition to do get the sand down. Overall we had to use about 10 or 11 m3 of sand to cover the full house site. We initially did half the house, and then covered this in plastic (used as a moisture barrier between the ground and the concrete), before putting down the pods and the steel. The pods are basically polystyrene boxes, each 109 cm by 109 cm, and we used a total of 136 of these, with just a few off cuts left over at the end. Between the pods there is a gap of 10 cm and at the bottom of this gap, there is a 12mm steel bar. On top of the pods we had steel sheets, consisting of 8mm steel bars, with a gap of 20 cm between each bar. A total of 18 of these were used (dimensions are 2.4 m by 6 m per sheet) and they were carried by the two of us and placed on top of the pods. Along the edges of the slab there are trench mesh consisting of 3 steel bars, each of 12 mm, and there are also 2 extra steel bars on top of the edges, both 12 mm. At all the inward corners of the house, there are an additonal two 12 mm bars of steel. Our conclusion is that there is a huge amount of steel in this slab!!! All this then had to be tied together using steel tiewire, which also took quite a few hours.

It took us a good 7 days to complete all the work, so no wonder we were quoted about AUD 2400 to have the work done by concreters. But having done it ourselves, at least we saved that money! And the result can be seen in pictures too:

Sand levelled and fixing plastic to the box work in what will become the dining room and kitchen	Sand levelled in what will become office, bed room and en-suite
Pods in place and steel lowered for shower recess	Extra steel in corners of slab
Finished result seen from garage roof - west side of the house	Finished result seen from garage roof - east side of the house
	Finished result, seen from the ground, looking from the west towards the east

Having completed all the steel work above, we then put our focus back on the garage. Geir finished putting up the fascia board and the gutter at the lower end of the roof, so that it was ready for our good friend Andy to again return amd help us with the roof. It was a blessing to have an extra pair of hands, considering that the roof sheets were 807 cm long and each sheet weights about 25 kg. Just the length of them makes it more or less impossible to handle just for to people, especially when it has to be pushed up on the roof, then held in place in order to screw it down to the battens.

But before putting up the roofing sheets, we put down reflective foil laminate, which helps keeping the heat inside the garage once the walls are up. We are not putting normal batts insluation in the garage as that would probably be a waste of money, but the reflecitive foil laminate also acts as a vapour barrier and stops condensation underneath the roofing sheets dripping down on everything inside the garage and workshop. The roof is about 11.5m by 8m so we should now be collecting at least twice as much water as we currently are (well, when we get the down pipe connected which will hopefully happen early next week - just have to buy those pipes and bends first!)

Unfortunately we were a bit to busy to take pictures as we worked on this yesterday, but at least here is the final result of the garage roof:

So we are now almost ready to start doing the bale work for the garage. We just have to sort out the supports for the windows and the doors, then put down some concrete bricks (besser blocks) at the edge of the slab, and then we can go ahead with the balework. Will be fun to finally start handling all the straw, and to see it being used to build our buildings.

In order to help us do the baling and the rendering we have also constructed some scaffholding. We have done one unit so far and hoping to do one more in the coming week. It is 2 metres tall, 1.5 metres wide and have 4 different levels were we can put the planks on. When both are finished, we can also place them a bit apart and have planks in between should we need to cover a bit area at one time. The wheels at one end also makes it easier to move from one location to another as it is built from steel and therefore a bit heavy.

And finally, we got a second hand cement mixer about a week ago. This was picked up through a flee market add in the local newspaper for the low sum of AUD 100. It is old, but has been really well maintained and runs really smoothly so it should most certainly cover our needs.

So, that is it for this week !!!

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