Another Brick in the Wall

This post has two parts: Pouring Flooring and Brick Walls

Pouring Flooring

The first thing you need to do is fill up your foundation and plinth with earth.

We didn't have much earth on the plot, so we had to truck some in, especially since we're well above ground level for most of the plinth. The quality of the earth doesn't have to be anything great.

Once the plinth has been laid, the earth is tamped down (yes, that is a real word), and left to settle. This is usually done in layers. It's also kept quite moist to drive out any air and to allow it to pack tighter.

This is what it looks like when all the earth has been packed in properly.

It is left like this for a few days to a coupe of weeks while people walk all over it to allow it to settle even more.

Once they're ready to pour in the concrete, a little more earth is spread over it to fill in any undulations.

The concrete is poured in and tamped down. They keep two bricks on the plinth and stretch a string between them. This defines the level of the floor. You can see one of the bricks near the tampers right foot.

So, what starts off looking like this...

Becomes something like this. It's flatted and smoothed out even more later.

This is the layer above which your tiles will go. So it doesn't have to be perfectly smooth.









Bricks and Walls

Before you begin building a house, you need to choose your bricks properly. Quality costs money, so be prepared to pay more for better bricks. You can see what kind of tests are done on bricks over here.

Our house is going to have exposed brick walls as well as plastered walls.

For the exposed brick walls, we need to get a higher quality brick, both in terms of shape as well as in terms of water absorption. That's this bunch on the left here.

The other bricks are still strong, but aren't quite as pretty.

We did this to save on costs. All the plastered walls will have these bricks inside.

The more expensive bricks were paid for at one shot and delivered in batches and the less expensive ones get paid for as they are delivered.

Before the are used, the bricks are given a good soaking. I think this is to allow the cement to cure more evenly. These things are basically sponges and tend to suck water out of the cement unless they have been soaked already.

When a fresh batch gets put in, you can see the air escaping through tiny tiny bubbles.

 After soaking, they are transported in small batches to the particular wall that it being built.

Usually, this is done the old fashioned way.

But sometimes, they use The Force to levitate the bricks. This is actually a lot more tiring than it looks, which is why they use the old fashioned method.

The first row sits directly on the plinth. It is measured and laid very carefully because this will define the rest of the wall.

The first step in laying a row of bricks is to slosh some cement on top of the row below.

The white thing over here is used to make sure that the thickness of the cement is consistent through out the wall.

The first brick on either side is placed vary carefully, after level the cement. These are then used to guide the remaining bricks with the clever use of some string.

The bricks are then lined up, keeping an eye on the row below. The spacing in between each brick is important. You want enough space for the cement and you need to have it be uniform with all the other rows.

To make a wall, you need to crack some bricks.

The bricks are then checked for evenness and nudged this way and that until they are perfectly in line with the bricks below and flat.

Cement is then poured over and worked into all the spaces.

And then you start the process over with the next row.

The process is the same for both types of walls, but a lot more care is taked with the exposed brick ones when it comes to use of cement.

On the right here you have an an exposed brick wall.

And here you have a wall that's going to be plastered.

Phew, I made it through the whole post without making any jokes about getting plastered or laid!

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.