Neighbours house moves on - Slowly!

All the reinforcements are now in place, and on Monday morning this 'monster' arrived. Follwed minutes later by a constant stream of cement lorries.....

The task now was to pour the liquid cement in thechannels built for it and over the huge heavy steel reinforcements. Believe it or not they completed the whole of the foundations in just under two hours....

And then onWednesday morning, with all the channel boards removed they began to lay what appeared to be plastic garden tables in the spage between the channels....
They kindly stood one on it's own next to the pile of those still to be laid so I could take the picture here below.

Once laid these were covered - once again - with steel reinforcement and liquid concrete poured over it all...
The idea is that these 'tables' form a huge air pocket under the building and keep the floors and foundations dry (like airbricks I guess. This is what they did to my house, but they had to dig under the whole house and 'prop' my walls up on bricks until the vespaia was set solid!!!!

I can understand now why houses take so much longer to build here than in the UK or North America.....The attention to detail is superb, and these houses don't come in prefabricated wood frame units that just need screwing together. Plus a 'work crew' here is - it seems - normally two men, with another one when jobs like the cement pouring takes place. That was the case thoughout the work on my place. I only saw more than two builders when they were putting the new roof on.... and was certainly why restructuring took a total of 13 months.....

One thing I did notice was that despite having the house described to me, it is really going to cover a lot of square meters. That in itself is no problem for me, as the only view it will block for me is that of the car park and offices behind (Hooray!!!!). My mountain views will remain intact! 

posted by Carole B @ 9:56 AM