Not a real farmer

“It’s been a while and I’ll admit I’ve been falling out of love with the project fast.”

That was the first sentence of a post I started writing 6 weeks ago. Although things have improved recently there was a stretch in the middle that was worse.

The slab went down almost fourteen weeks ago; it needed to cure for four weeks but another four weeks evaporated before timber framing began. In fairness, some of this was lost to wrangling over the details but otherwise things had slowed.

We are living nearby while the house is being built and until recently I would drive past the block every day. Eventually though there are only so many days you can look at nothing happening and I started going another way to save the dark mood.

Despite the doom and gloom we have had most of the timber framing for the external walls and brickwork for the internal walls go up.

Yes that’s right, our house is inside out.

The framing process identified a necessary structural change and all of a sudden we have five unwelcome steel columns going into the house. Don’t get me wrong, steel is a wonderful material but when it comes along unplanned it’s a budget killer.

On a positive note our wonderful windows have been ordered and are being busily made somewhere in Austria right now…well probably not right now. Their working day isn’t due to start for a couple of hours but I would like to think they are getting stuck into a hearty breakfast ready to go. The windows are the single biggest risk we have taken on this project and so far there has only been one thing I wish I had done differently which I am pretty happy with.

The aerobic septic system has also been installed. This is a large concrete tank two and a half meters wide by just as tall, buried, with a painted pale green top and prone to looking as ugly as sin if you get them in the wrong place. Thankfully, there is always a silver lining if you look hard enough. The first one to this story is that I used some of the recent slow time to work out exactly where all our tanks would be going including the aerobic system and some more traditional ones for rainwater.

My father accuses me of over planning but in this case the layout of the tanks is quite different to what we were intending and will hopefully achieve a good future outcome. I find that a lot of the time spent in this ‘over’ planning and design phase is about finding out what doesn’t work as much as what does. Unless I have a burning idea about exactly what I want to do I then spend more time again designing in as much flexibility as possible. This means that when that burning idea finally finds me there hopefully isn’t a giant lump of concrete in the way or some other similar hindrance.

The second silver lining to this story is that when they were digging the hole for the tank they hit rock.

”What ! Isn’t hitting rock bad?”

Well in this case they hit shale and towards the bottom of the hole it was very nice shale, dare I call it slate. Although the shale slowed the earth mover down a little it didn’t stop him. It did however give us a few nice piles of rock to use around our future garden. For a little while there, tank forgotten I was ready to go into the quarry business.

Well a theory that has served me well in the past has had to be thrown right out the window. The slab is finally down and in direct contradiction to an earlier post embarrassingly titled “the slab stage always looks so tiny” it actually looks surprisingly big.

I think I need to make an adjustment to the theory for waffle pod slabs like the one we have. Because a waffle pod sits above the ground rather than in it you can see the whole thing and my gosh there’s a lot of it. Our slab has 375mm waffle pods under a 130mm slab so all up our floor level is half a meter above the ground next to it. With a normal slab in the ground you only see the top part. Apart from making the slab look much bigger than I expected there are a couple of other nice surprises that has come along with it. Firstly the slab is a great height for a seat and you are spoilt for choice of where to sit. Secondly, even through it is only half a meter up when you are standing on top it feels like the view is so much more satisfying. We would have loved to had a two storey home for the views but we are now thinking the much more economical waffle pod will suit us nicely. We still have to add a little bit of fill and concrete paths around the perimeter of the house meaning we will loose some of our height. With 340mm left there will be two comfortable steps up into the house. If we then add some decking at the same level as the house floor we still have much of our outdoor seating taken care of.

When I got to the block at 7:00am it was already a hive of activity with the guys adding the last of the form work and the concrete pump being set up. Some where around 8:00am the first concrete truck arrived, one of seven. With around seven cubic meters of concrete per truck this meant there was just short of 50 cubic meters worth in our house slab. From a carbon emission point of view this is probably not ideal and when I am feeling courageous I might even do the sums. I do however hope that all that concrete can earn its keep with the house having been designed to maximise its use as thermal mass soaking up the sun during the day in winter and the coolth of the night in summer.

The concrete was coming up from Adelaide so by the time it arrived it had been on the road for around 45 minutes. The topping mix used for the polished floor has a much higher percentage of cement in the mix, this makes it harder but as a consequence it also sets faster. The first five minutes of a truck being on site was spent adding water to the mix to get it back to the right consistency.

The slab was poured over the next three or so hours in two main parts. The main beams around the edge of the slab and between the waffle were poured with a standard mix before the harder topping mix on top of that. One of the slightly unusual things about this slab is the extruded foam insulation around the edge. Extruded foam (XPS) is different to the more common expanded foam (EPS). XPS is stronger, more impact resistant and is impervious to water. This will help keep the heat from the hydronic floor system inside as much as possible. Tho concrete was poured up the the bottom level of the foam and troweled level. The foam was then set on top of this inside the form work and the remainder poured around it. As no one on site had used the XPS before it was anyones guess as to what would happen when the formwork was taken away. Thank fully it had stuck and didn’t fly off with the wind.

The concrete was finished off with several passes with the hand trowel and ‘helicopter’, progressively winding up the blades to get a smoother and smoother finish. If we had wanted to have a burnished finish they would have continued to wind the blade up to run on a steeper angle. Eventually the baldes are so steep the edges are effectively burning the concrete giving it the high polish burnished concrete is known for. The slab finished the day with a coat of curing agent from the company who will be grinding the floor for the polished concrete finish. By this stage the chemical reactions in the slab had made it quite warm and it was cooking nicely. We’ve been told that if it cracks it should be in the first 72 hours. Touch wood… 30 hours in its looking good and with the mild weather yesterday, today and for the rest of the week it should help the slab cure a bit more slowly.

Although we are now 2 weeks into autumn the weather is still hot. The temperature has been above 30 degrees for quite some time and today was 38 degrees in Adelaide with tomorrow tipped to be 39 degrees. Thankfully where we are the Adelaide Hills is usually 2-3 degrees cooler in the summer, unfortunately we are also cooler in the winter but I prefer this to the other way around.

Across summer the trees have been deep watered every fortnight to keep them ticking over. As the season became longer and hotter growth had effectively stopped compared to the significant gains made early on. In the last week or so the trees seem to know it should be autumn and appear to be getting ready for another growth spurt prior to dormancy over winter. As a bit of encouragement and to make sure they have everything they need they were given some fertiliser prior to watering this weekend.

When watering I always wander around and check the sprinkler under each tree for blockages. This time out of the corner of my eye I noticed something moving amongst the grass under one of our elms. WIth a closer look I found two small leverets (baby hares) struggling under the water from the sprinkler. I didn’t want to handle them more than I had to incase the mother rejected them due to unfamiliar scents so I ran to the shed to find a container to put them in. By the time I got back one of them had given up and looked worryingly dead. I got them out into the sun and called Dad over who happened to be helping me with the watering. They were saturated from the sprinkler and after not being able to find anything that was going to be scent free we had to dry them in our shirts.

There are many hares that live in the area and we have seen leverets in the past but never any this young. The one that looked dead seemed to respond well to the warmth and went from not moving to being able to turn itself over and sit with its sibling. One advantage to the hot weather is the sun and warm breeze continued to dry the little leverets after the initial going over with a shirt.

When we had first arrived I had noticed a hare run off from the area where we found the leverets. This would have been the mum after she had tucked them into their little hiding hole for safe collection later. Because we couldn’t move them we had to switch the sprinklers off and swap to a different watering circuit. We set them up with some dry grass and left them for mum to pick up, most likely after dark. Three hours later when the water was switched off they weren’t there.

We had our second site meeting with the builder on the weekend, and as it was 8am by we I mean me. There was nothing particularly interesting to report other than that soon there should be a lot of interesting things to report.

The big news for the meeting is that we now have a sign on the front gate. The builder has recently re-branded so our sign was hot off the press number one. It was clearly popular with the locals with a cloud of midges hanging out in front of it all morning. I patiently waited for them to get out of the shot but apparently it was the place to be. Thankfully once I shrunk the photo down for this you can’t really see them.

The slab is due to be formed up next Saturday so other than a couple of the waste pipes having to be moved and a few potential deliveries there will not be a lot happening on site this week.

Something I have often heard in the past and it has rung true for me so far is that things are much better once you get out of the ground. In our case this will be once the slab is there. Getting out of the ground can be where some of the nasty money surprises come from. If all goes well you will have nothing but solid ground where you want to put your house, if not you might have a small long lost cellar that needs to be filled in and in the case of someone I know I imagine it went something like this,

Builder: “so…it turns out the whole back of your block is loose fill from something or rather in the past”

Owner: “ok…what does that mean”

Builder: “Well…um…we need to go down 12m with screw piles and then build the slab to be self supporting on top of that”

Owner: “A lot of concrete?”

Builder: “yep, more than you can imagine”

Unfortunately when ground problems pop up its generally not a case of tipping some dirt in. This becomes the realm of ‘controlled fill’, engineers can get involved and it can get interesting fast. In the case of the small long lost cellar I referred to above, I once saw a job where a unknown cellar entrance ramp was found. In that case they cut their losses and filled the whole thing with concrete.

I came home from work to find the plumber had been and left the site looking a bit like an abstract forest art installation in PVC. Because we are having a waffle pod slab which floats on top of the ground rather than in it the pipes have to be long enough to get up through the floor which in this case is about half a meter up.

With the house pad prepared, string lines up and plumbing in you can start to get an idea of the size and spaces in the house when walking around. As is always the case in my experience a house at the slab stage looks tiny for some reason. When the timber framing is up it will look huge, when the roof is on and external walls are up it will look tiny again and finally when the internal plaster walls are up it will look big again.

Why…..well…..with the slab I have no idea but with the others my theory is that it is to do with the amount of light. At timber framing it is open and airy borrowing space and views beyond the frames which only really trace the edges of the building. With the roof on and external walls up it is often quite dark inside due to darker, matt materials sucking the light out of the space. By the time you put the light coloured internal plasterboard up it bounces the light around and it feels much more open again. Sigh of relief.

When I was previously working in architecture I had been through this process with clients on their houses. It would sometimes worry them and privately make me as the designer a little nervous. However at the end of the day “you have to trust your drawings” if it works on paper, touch wood, so far it has worked in real life.

My wife, known for her sarcasm, declared “we are going to be living on a postage stamp”. When I let her know that it will in fact be twice the size of out last home, all of a sudden we were “living on two postage stamps”. At least two stamps would get us international which is entirely appropriate for the windows we hope to use but that’s for another day.