We now have beautifully smooth house and garage slabs. Big congratulations to the whole groundworks team – and relief!
Steve and I had hoped to see the concrete pour while we were up in Ardnamurchan last week, and whilst we were ready for it to be poured, unfortunately there was a big hydro project on that week that required every concrete lorry in the area to be utilised. In the grand scheme of things, with the serious challenges across the construction industry at the moment, to be only 1 week behind the schedule that Steve (Faryma) and JJ set out in March is a real achievement. And fortunately Steve F took plenty of pics and videos.
The concrete was poured over two days, with two lorries arriving each day. The warm weather, plus the insulation, meant the pressure was on to work the concrete before it started to set. With a smooth surface and allowable level deviations a maximum of +/- 3mm, there was very little margin for error. Couple of long days for the team, but they’re very happy with the result.
More about the concrete
In addition to the ReGen half carbon concrete, with steel mesh joining the list of scarce supplies in the past few weeks, someone suggested we look into replacing mesh with fibre in the concrete itself. As well as being lower embodied carbon (both from the material itself but also because of considerably lower carbon cost of transporting to site), the fibre is mixed into the concrete before it arrives on site, so it can make it significantly easier to deal with rather than putting in a second layer of steel mesh during the concrete pouring process. We sent our details off to the fibre manufacturer, and whilst we couldn’t replace both layers of mesh, we were able to just have the bottom layer. As this amount of steel mesh could both be sourced and laid ahead of time, it was a good solution. I haven’t done the carbon calculations yet, but will do to see how the different solutions compared.
And the windows arrived
With the huge supply problems within the building industry at the moment – both shortage of materials themselves but also haulage – we are getting hold of materials when we can, rather than the more usual ‘just in time’ approach. We certainly wouldn’t have planned to receive the windows on the same day as the concrete (!) but that’s how it turned out.
Because of the gradient of the track up to our site and the challenge of turning space, the Austrian lorry driver transporting our windows parked up at the bottom of the track, leaving Steve F to offload and inch very slowly up the hill with the precious cargo. The whole offloading process took about 4 hours. They’re now safely stored in the container on site, and should be installed towards the end of August/ early September.
We then had our second ‘Grand Designs jeopardy moment’ in one of those ‘you couldn’t make it up’ scripts. Having waited 14 weeks for our electricity installation (with increasing amounts of time in the past 6 weeks involved me banging my head against one of those utility company brick walls you too frequently come across), miraculously an engineer suddenly became available to come to site. Of course it coincided with concrete and window delivery day on Wedensday, but in theory shouldn’t have been a problem. In theory.
In practice, the engineer arrived in his van at a similar time to the windows arriving. He then managed to put his van into the ditch at the side of the track (in a ditch that certainly no-one else driving up and down the track has ever discovered!), slightly blocking the track thus making window transportation even more nerve wracking for Steve than it already was. There were plenty of vehicles on site who could have pulled the van out, but unfortunately there wasn’t a tow loop on the van. The other most unfortunate part was that he’d managed to go into the ditch trapping the door to the van that gave him access to his tools… So we wait for the metre installation to happen on another day – hopefully this week.
Next step: external drains and kit construction!