The start of the concrete pour - made with Ecocem GGBS cement.
To fill the main foundation we needed 2 truck deliveries, and a fair amount of moving the stuff around.
This is what 14 cubic meters of concrete looks like (at 30cm deep). Two phrases come to mind - "over-engineered" and "ecological footprint". Ecocem is better than typical concrete, but it is still not good enough.
Frames of rebars were assembled and inserted into the wet concrete once it was leveled. These vertical rebars tie the footing base into the vertical walls of hollow blocks, the holes then filled with concrete to make one continuous structure for the base of the building. This was seen as necessary to deal with the horizontal and racking loading of the building (primarily from wind), and it allows us to use less structure on the perimeter of the two houses.
Robbie the donkey came for a visit to see what was going on.
The completed primary slab, with vertical rebars in place.
View of one of the cellar rooms with rebars for the perimeter wall and the structural fin walls.
The start of the concrete pour - made with Ecocem GGBS cement.
To fill the main foundation we needed 2 truck deliveries, and a fair amount of moving the stuff around.
This is what 14 cubic meters of concrete looks like (at 30cm deep). Two phrases come to mind - "over-engineered" and "ecological footprint". Ecocem is better than typical concrete, but it is still not good enough.
Frames of rebars were assembled and inserted into the wet concrete once it was leveled. These vertical rebars tie the footing base into the vertical walls of hollow blocks, the holes then filled with concrete to make one continuous structure for the base of the building. This was seen as necessary to deal with the horizontal and racking loading of the building (primarily from wind), and it allows us to use less structure on the perimeter of the two houses.
Robbie the donkey came for a visit to see what was going on.
The completed primary slab, with vertical rebars in place.
View of one of the cellar rooms with rebars for the perimeter wall and the structural fin walls.
Hi Bruce,
ReplyDeleteThe foundations look very big for a timber frame house, is there a reason for this--well done on the blog--very interesting to see the progress.
John
Does wind cause more stress on the foundations than a traditional block built house?Is this the reason for the large foundations?
ReplyDeleteJohn
The large foundations are due to the poor soil conditions we found on site. There is also the need to have something substantial to hold down the house in high winds. This is usually done by perimeter foundations, but in our case we focused all of this mass in the central core.
ReplyDelete... and there is a significant amount of "over-engineering" dictated by convention and our engineer
ReplyDelete