Steel 'n Rock

Six tons of reinforcing for the foundations arrived on time and in pieces. A crew arrived to assemble it and this was supposed to take five days until complete. We're now ten days into the assembly process and about half way. So we've already lost a week. Each section needs to be tied together with wire and the collection of assembled sections occupied an extraordinary amount of space. Without a doubt, this house will never crack. The foundation footings and beams are substantial. I found the assembly crew had built a fire to burn the coils of wire that they were using to tie the bars. Apparently this makes it 'softer' and easier to work with and I can sympathise with their efforts in this regard. It is quite a task that they were presented and only now do I really appreciate the work that they've done.

Today was spent placing and tying the various sections of reinforcing together in the excavated foundations of the house. The process was fortunately quite painless but there is a degree of urgency. The readymix concrete is arriving tomorrow morning.
Today the engineer came for his final inspection and other than being absolutely stunned by our rammed earth test wall, was quite happy with what he saw. The structural design ignores the rammed earth structural strength completely, but after seeing the wall the engineer agrees that we have somewhat over-designed the structural members. This house will last generations!

We are still busy chipping away at a hard section of rock in the utility building foundation. It's an eight metre section that's valiantly resisting our attempts to break it up but after a week of being subjected to a hydraulic jack hammer, it is nearly all removed. I spoke too soon in an earlier post saying that we had not encountered any problems. But of course problems lie in wait and you only encounter them when you think the worst is behind you. However, hopefully early next week these foundations will be ready with the reinforcing in place for the next batch of concrete.

The rammed earth walls will begin 150mm above ground level. This will avoid any damp issues that may develop by wicking moisture up from the ground. They will be built on a facebrick cladded stem wall which means that two or possibly three rows of facebrick will be visible above ground level. This calls for decorative decision and several facebrick samples have been sitting on our test wall while we have been mulling over our options. The red would go with the red oxide layer and the mottled black with the black oxide layer. The tan would go with the wall and the rough "rock" finish makes it look quite natural. Choices, choices! However the general consensus is the tan colour. The debate that now rages - do we want it rough or do we want it smooth?