It's raining again

Things really slowed during October, with what seemed like constant rain whist the shuttering for the garage was being sorted. Firstly the slab, whose mould was formed from wood, by Tony the shuttering carpenter. A cheerful chap called Jan was on site for a couple of days fitting steel wires into what looked like a mattress structure over which the concrete would be poured, and vertical bars were threaded into position for the bottom of the walls ("starter bars") topped off with more little orange cups so as to prevent people poking their eyes out on them. The first concrete delivery day was somewhat fraught as the two truck-loads of concrete were together 1 cubic metre short and a third delivery had to be fetched as the almost-complete slab was already going off. Luckily we're only a few minutes' drive from the nearest Cemex plant and all was OK in the end. Andy phoned me to tell me about the panic just at the moment I was trying to direct my colleague Daniel round the busy streets of Cardiff en route to a conference where we were presenting, so not a stressful day at all!

Back on site later that week, off came the wooden shuttering around the slab and starter bars which were set into the little base wall around the bottom (the "kicker") that had been formed with the slab itself. Then the realisation that the front part of the kicker either side of the garage doorway had been built in the wrong place, set back a bit like the walls themselves instead of flush with the front of the slab as designed! Julian could rectify that though without too much hassle. Watching the progress of the walls themselves was slow and painful, with the heavy rain hampering works - not being ideal to use power tools in torrential rain. But also because at the base of the walls we had to have a strip of waterproofing material called a "water bar" where the walls met the kicker at the base - and this couldn't get wet. We all wished for just two days in a row of dry weather but it didn't come.

Meanwhile the site sat looking forlorn, with our foundations covered over with piles of spoil waiting around to be backfilled once the garage walls were done. Hearing tales of woe from washed-out building sites around the country made us feel a bit better that it wasn't "just us".

p.s. Sure, I've been a bit lax about blog updates of late, so doing a bit of backfilling now. And yes the dates on these posts have been backdated. It's not like I'm not actually late in handing in an essay though am I?