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Australia affordable houses
Welcome to part 2 of my article,
Dear readers, this is part 2 of our article Australia affordable houses. In our previous blog we have explained what is meant by concrete on building sites, and what you need to make concrete, now we want to explain the best way to work with concrete. To concrete well
and do a fair amount of work you need a team, even if it is a
small team. Our team was usually three of us, I as builder labor, John as
bricklayer and Con the contractor who was a bricklayer and concrete layer as well. We didn’t
mind if we switched around a bit to do the job. So, I was usually on the mixer
mixing the concrete, one was with a wheelbarrow taking the concrete from the
mixer to the foundations that we were concreting, and one was fixing the
concrete in place.
Fixing the concrete
for the foundation was physically the lightest job, when we were mixing the
concrete with this mixer on site, but it is the most responsible job, because
while concreting the foundations, you must make sure that the steel rods
reinforcement was in the right position, at the same time you had to pack the
concrete down and then the concrete in the foundations has to be finished
level, this was easy when the ground was level, but when the ground was not
level, it was necessary that steps were made and they had to be made to gauge, which
was equal to the thickness of one or two laid bricks or more, or the thickness
of a laid block, if blocks were going to be used to build the walls on this
foundation, whatever was going to be used to lay on the foundations, we had to
try to make an adjustment while we were laying the foundations; therefore, this
was the job for the experts, at that time it was not that hard, because mixing
by hand even using a mixer was a slow job, so, the bloke that was fixing the
concrete had enough time to do his job right.
What I have written
above is how we used to lay small house foundations in the early sixties, which
are the same as we lay foundations today, except that today we order concrete
already mixed, but we have to be ready with everything and everything has got
to be in the right place, because the concrete ready-mix truck will unload its
concrete quickly, so, there is no time to do anything else except to fix the
concrete at the right level as quickly as possible.
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Concreting stumps on site
Now let me go back
again to the early sixties, when we were concreting these stumps on site, this
procedure is not done much today, the reasons for this change it is because the
buildings have changed, and today these stumps can be made in a concrete
factory, if they are not too big, and when cured can be delivered to the building site, where the worker
can erect them as required. Large stumps or columns are usually still made on site, but with a different procedure, using read mixed concrete in form-work
To concrete these
stumps on site we had steel forms of various length, and these forms were
assembled together with steel pins, so, we would assemble these steel forms and
then start to mix concrete, we had also to make sure that the stumps
foundations were exactly in the right place by using the marked profiles and
tight line between them.
In this case, it
was an easy job for the fellow that is mixing concrete, but a lot harder for
the blokes that had to pour the concrete in the stumps form-work and make sure
that the stump was exactly in the right place and finished at the right height
and were also plumb (perfect vertical position). It was also necessary that
some reinforcing rods were placed in the right position with a purpose made
devise. These are how we made those onsite stumps in the sixties.
These concrete
stumps that we made in the sixties were better that the timber stumps that they
were replacing, because it was an improvement as they did not rot with the
passing of time and the white ants could not eat them. Here we can say that
these concrete stumps on site were easy to make, if you knew the procedure, in
fact it was easier to make a set of stumps than to fix concrete stumps made in
the factory, as there is no heavy lifting involved.
But although these
concrete stumps were easy to make, they are hard to move to a different
position. So, to anyone that is going to attempt to dig out these stumps to
move them to a new position, they better think twice because I tell you that
the part that is under the ground is a lot larger than the stumps at the top.
Remember what I said in our previous article, we had to dig a hole
sixty-centimetre dip in the natural ground, and at the bottom should be a level
base not less than forty centimetres x forty centimetres square.
I believe that we
have said enough in this article, as we have explained the work that we did on
these affordable houses and we will be coming back to talk about more building
work in our next article, house building in Brisbane. See you soon.
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This blog is, old man-lifeworks
Building concrete requires team work
IS TO BE CONTINUED WITH
House building in Brisbane
See you soon.
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