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5th to 11th April 2004

Another week with few obvious visible differences.

Most of the week was taken up with cleaning up, putting mesh into the new sections of wall, making wooden boxes to form padstones upon which the steel will rest, filling these with concrete along with the cavities of the last couple of sections of wall around the garage.

This week's main lesson is make the joints on padstone formers much stronger than you might expect - unless you like juggling wet concrete that is!  Also think about which plane a pad stone needs to be in - the longer length will be perpendicular to the beam....

This week's main surprise is that I actually did some proper block laying and it doesn't seem too bad (ie level, vertical and still standing after a few days) - I got bored with trying to catch up with the blockie and only have a bit left so gave it a try.  I'll never be quick nor able to cope with large amounts but it saved some time (and money).

This week's change in plans - we will be having a bridge from the LHS of the garages, going over the garage doors leading to the front door.  The span is 7.7m.  We had thought to do this in concrete beams - we could do it but speaking to the RMC rep highlighted that getting the beams to site would be tricky - if not impossible.  So now we'll split this span in two and build a thin supporting wall midway across the span - fortunately this lines up with the central pier between the garage doors so wont look too bad.