Monthly Archives: August 2017
Getting ready for the floor slab & walls
We are getting going on organising our August/September session at the steading, just two weeks, unfortunately. Ric will go up the week before and stay on for a week afterwards.
We will have a fairly demanding timeline to get our big job done, getting the floor slab laid:
- Dig out the remaining steading floors- all the long northern stretch and much of the west wing. We need to screen the soil and find somewhere to deposit it all. I expect this will fill the week before we arrive.
- Clean up the floors round the edges where the digger had trouble, level it all out to 53cm or so below finished floor. We will be doing this for a day or two, as soon as we get up there.
- Spread 200mm hardcore, probably in two layers, using a wacker plate to get it compacted. At the edges where the slab needs to bear structural timber, we do not place hardcore, so we can thicken the slab downwards. I expect we need a bit less than a week.
- Spread 5cm soft sand to blind the hardcore, a couple of days work.
- Lay Damp Proof Membrane (polythene), double-taped where the sheets join. A days work.
- Use supports to get sheets of A252 rebar mesh in place. I expect we will do this just ahead of the concrete so we keep reasonable access.
- Get the concrete mixer trucks in with 30 cubic metres of concrete, have a fun few days getting it placed, levelled and presentable. This will be much better if we can get mixers with concrete elevators on the back – not sure yet. As far as we know, my youngest brother Geoff is still coming up to do the skilful bits. Three days work I reckon.
Obviously we do not want a lot of rain over the period, I expect showers will not stop us but heavy rain will. I foresee some long old days.
We have various sections of drain, for the bathroom, cloakroom and en-suites, that will be under the slab. We will do leakage tests on them before we cover them permanently. We stick a bung at the end of the section of pipe e.g. where it goes into an inspection chamber. We create a 1500mm head of water and check that no more than 50ml per 1-metre run of pipe leaks over two hours. We also want to run an electrical cable through the sand blinding towards where we want our polytunnel – 6mm2, 3-core.
Whilst this is going on, we will get everything needed to start building walls. We have to build a leaf of blockwork 220mm wide on the inside by laying standard blocks on their sides. We will tie them in to the existing walls. We paint liquid DPM on the outside face of blockwork and use our steel expanded mesh to tie the outer leaf of granite in to the blockwork. We will get 8 or so bags of NHL 3.5 (medium strength) lime and experiment using local sharp sand to make lime mortar. All being well, we can use any time not doing floor slab on getting some experience of actually building upwards – essential if we hope to get our roof on by the end of next year.
The shopping list is looking like this:
- 1.7 tonne digger, hire 3 weeks
- Mini dumper, hire 3 weeks
- Wacker plate, hire 1 week
- Soft sand, 18 tonnes
- 1200 gauge DPM, 25m x 4m x 3 packs
- Single-sided tape, 100m
- Double-sided tape, 100m
- A252 Rebar mesh, 240 sq m
- Mesh supports, as many as we need
- 6 sq mm armoured cable, 50m
- NHL 3.5 Lime, 25kg x 8
- Sharp sand, 2 tonnes
- Stainless steel wall ties, 200
- Expamet 20m x 65mm, 3
- Synthaprufe liquid DPM, 25 l
- Hessian 40m x 1.4m (to protect the lime mortar while it goes off), 2