Another week, another slab

A big week at the ol' homestead...

The floor protection came up from the basement, revealing a very nice slab underneath. Our design of jailcell-chic is coming along well.

Mt Everest continues to grow in the front yard. Funnily the builders are now complaining about a lack of space... We expect the rubbish to go in the next week or so, more deliveries are expected and they have to go somewhere!

The slab preparations now include electrical conduits (grey tubes), plumbing wastes (large grey tubes), the in-slab heating coils (blue wires), the formwork for the bathroom (top right hand corner), and some yellow outlines that indicate where rooms, walls and cupboards will end up (so that the conduits, coils and other features don't end up in the wrong place).

Notice below the little coil of wire leaning off to the left (next to his foot)? That's the thermostat wire for the in-slab heating. It's in the wrong place, since that's a big doorway/glass wall. Notice the black tube coming out of the sky? That's the concrete about to flow onto the deck and over the wiring. Fortunately the wiring guy showed up quickly and moved it, while the concrete was being poured around him. Nice detail: he also moved some of the wiring in the bathroom so that there was heating right in front of the toilet seat...

So where's that tube coming from?A rather large pump truck... (and apparently the previous truck was bigger. No idea how that fitted, there's not much spare space with this one).




We didn't quite take up the whole road, and it only took an hour for it all to be poured. Watching these guys work leaves you very impressed; it's an art form shoving twenty tons of concrete around and levelling it all by hand - to better than 2mm at any point across the whole surface (60 sq.m or so)

Following the pour, they spent the rest of the day (till well after sunset) brushing and polishing the slab. Much of it by hand. If you have any OH&S nervousness, look away now. Just ignore the fact that he's tip-toe balanced on a three-inch wide strip of timber and foam and working the concrete by hand, while his heels are dangling out across a ten foot/three meter drop...