After being away for 10 days, the site looks very different again. Before, we had a layout on the ground and had to imagine how it would look as we went. Now that floor is concrete, and with the rear walls of the basement up it's gone 3D. The rear walls are huge to stand beside - over 3.5 metres tall. A typical room with reasonably high ceilings is about 2.7 metres tall, so we're a metre again up. For a totally useless piece of information, the weight of just this section is about 340 tonnes! Also completely useless is the fact that if you had a big enough crane, you could actually lift the entire structure up - the radon barrier completely separates it from the ground underneath.
There is an access panel for brining in the live ESB - it comes in at the base, in the floor, up through the wall into the meter box, then back through the wall up to the top of the wall. This can then route into the suspended ceiling that will hang from the roof and route in the far corner in the picture (left most corner) - it comes in from picture right.
The wall itself is watertight (due to the amount of cement in the concrete) but the back of it nearest the wall needs to be tanked - that is made watertight (more so). This involves placing a layer of waterproof membrane all along the wall and bonding it to the Radon barrier that is also waterproof. You can see the tight space that lies in here
The radon barrier is cleaned off and wrapped up tight to the wall and the membrane overlaps it. Also in here we need to place a drain, as even when it's dry as today the back wall is weeping water. A layer of drainage stone goes in, another of the yellow land-drainage pipes goes on top, and we fill in with more stone to above where the wall is damp, about 1.2 metres. Where this picture is now will eventually be right under the main house itself.
We marked out the internal ICF walls as well, these will start to be assembled on Wednesday, and will form the rest of the outer walls, as well as some load bearing internal ones. By Saturday, we're likely to be ready to pour these with concrete, and we'll have the first section of the house structure complete.
Before we pour, there are a number of services that need to transit through these walls, and we'll place pipes where they cross through before pouring. This prevents us later having to drill though the mass concrete. All in all, now most of the tricky stage is complete, and with hopefully a few weeks of fine weather that you expect as all the poor students sit down to write exams, we can get cracking and make a good push on the build. Finally - our nutritious grass and diesel fumes are having a positive effect on the local wildlife with a new lawnmower gambling about, no fear of our grass getting out of hand.
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