Site progress

Before we get into the specifics of brick building, here's an update on things that have happened on the site.

Sump Covers

All the sumps have been covered with reinforced concrete. The process is the same as pretty much anything else you do with reinforced concrete. Create a mold, add metal. Pour in a mixture of cement, sand, water and gravel. Let it set.

While the concrete is curing, you have to keep it wet, otherwise the outside will dry out and crack. Controlling the rate at which it cures is important. Here they've built temporary levees out of sand and poured some water in.

Luckily, because of the monsoons and the weather being so nice, we aren't loosing that much water to evaporation. In fact, everytime it rains, we're happy.











Columns

There are a few columns around the site. Vertical moulds held up with large sticks. You can't see it too well, but there's a brick hanging on for dear life to a nail on the top horizontal plank. From what I can figure out it looks like the brick is torquing the plank in to tighten everything up.

There are also some smaller round columns. They just bought a piece of plastic pipe, slid it down the metal and filled it with concrete.










Site Visits

Remember how I said it was nice to have your architect involved during construction? No? Well go back and read that blog entry.

Here's Georg looking professional and making some measurements.

This is a meeting on site between my contractor (second from left), his people and Eepsita (second from right), who is Georg's colleague.

There was some confusion about the finer details of one of the walls. It was sorted out quite quickly.

That said, they spotted a small mistake and some of the work had to be removed. Luckily for us, the cement hadn't set completely, so we were able to pull out the bricks and use them elsewhere.

Yay for saving resources! Yay for saving money! It's amazing how often those two things overlap.

This is why it's important to keep an eye on the construction. There will be mistakes, because this is a very complicated process. Can't say that this was anyone's fault, we could just chalk it up to a communication error.


Retaining Walls

Since we liked the texture and look of the retaining wall so much, we've decided to make the entire compound wall look like that. We're using all the rocks we dug out of the site.

A textured wall with dappled lighting. At least, I think this is dappled. Once again, Yay for saving resources and Yay for saving money!

Everything Else

So, my wife and I just moved to a new apartment a couple of weeks ago. Which is why I haven't updated the blog in a while. In that time there's been quite a lot of work done. Here's what the site looked like on the 7th of June and then on the 19th of June.

Work really is picking up. As my mother in law said "Things are now coming together." I think she was paraphrasing John "Hannibal" Smith of the A-Team.

To end, a bunch of random pictures from the site...

Puppy!

Some small graffiti that was covered by some bricks later. Apparently someone loves Ranji.

Found a dismantled VHS tape on the ground. No idea how it got there. For any children out there, VHS tapes were how people watched movies at home for a couple of decades.