FRANTIC FRIDAY

Friday 9 December 2011 was a busy day on site. We had 10 pallets of bricks and blocks arriving, Ciolli Brothers were due to pour 17cu.m of concrete, and the builders wanted to get started on the rear boundary wall.

So that's how the morning began. Building of the rear boundary wall started using concrete blocks which had been delivered the day before. This wall is built of MA190 blocks, basically hollow concrete blocks dimensioned 390mm long X 190mm high X 190mm wide. For most of the house as well as the front boundary wall we are using solid imperial size bricks, 220mm long X 72mm high X 105mm wide. All our bricks and blocks are concrete, and sourced from Cape Brick, a local manufacturer based less than 20km from the site. Cape Brick has excellent environmental credentials. Their concrete masonry products have an average recycled content of 70%. In fact they claim to use 10% of all concrete building rubble generated in the Cape Town region in the manufacture of their products. And again their close proximity to site keeps the transportation carbon footprint smaller too. So although we are using heaps of concrete, a huge proportion of it is either blast furnace slag or recycled rubble, so no guilty conscience there. And the longevity of the product as well as its excellent thermal mass characteristics will minimise life cycle costs of the building further.

Our engineer specified that our concrete footings be 300mm thick. The 17cu.m of 25MPa foundation concrete came in 3 separate trucks, the first two carrying 6cu.m each. When we saw how much was still left to pour after the first two trucks, we contacted the supplier to increase the final batch from 5 to 6cu.m. The extra concrete was needed as the trenches became ever wider with the sand continuously falling in and being dug out again. This extra concrete order delayed the third truck for a couple of hours, which gave the builder a little time to keep building on the rear boundary wall. A productive day all round.

The north wall foundation concrete in its final resting place

Progress on the rear boundary wall

Overview of the site from the rear