Construction 101

I've been thinking a while about showing the construction progress next door. It may not be the most facinating for all, but living next to it for 8 months so far, it has been kind of interesting. So I'll chronicle the progress to date.

First it started out in March with a backhoe. He came and in about 2 days dug this lot empty to a large hole about one story deep. I don' have pictures of just the concrete foundations being poured, but they were all about 2 feet thick, with re-bar in them, and the re-bar for the columns coming out of them. You can see them here, with the mixer they used to mix all the concrete. It would run with the most obnoxious loud grinding sound for days on end when they were mixing concrete. Once this was done, they built a small brick room towards the back, near, but not surrounding the well housing. And they poured concrete supports between the uprights. I think this was also part of the support for the ground floor, but I'm not sure. you can see the wooden cement forms stacked up on the right. One side seems to be coated with something which helps it not stick to the concrete.

Then they proceeded to fill the hole with sand. I didn't get pictures of them doing that for the Apt building (I was out of town), but I did manage to get it for the independent house which they started next door. Although that has been stopped for more than a month now-reason not entirely clear. In this picture you can see a couple of other things. One is the supports they use to hold up the forms (see later), and you can also see the shack that the construction workers lived in before the apt building reached a point where they could move into part of it.

Then they poured the flooring, well more dumped it. It was damp, but not really wet sand, rock and cement mixed, and carried out. Then they sprayed it with water to get it really wet. I guess it was easier to handle this way. I was expecting by now that it would take them years to get even the next couple of floors up.

But I was wrong. Things started to proceed pretty quickly at this point. They would put up the forms for the columns, pour the cement over a day or two, all by hand, then they would start setting up the forms for the next floor. It was all held up by what look like random pieces of wood, but seem to be specifically cut and sized for the task. There are some steel poles used, I think they set the actual height, and the wood is adjusted to work with the rest. Then they quickly bring in the re-bar and pour the lateral supports and the floor together. This is where the heavy equipment shows up again.
They use a concrete pump and pre-mixed trucks of concrete. It is all poured in a matter of hours (unfortunately they seem to choose Saturday mornings at about 8 am to start (except for yesterday when they started at 6:30, right outside our window). They also brought in the pump at about 3:30am and woke us up when positioning it with the heavy diesel truck. Just like anywhere else in the world, it seems to take almost as many supervisors as workers.

And then they started on the walls. About 3 weeks ago, they started bringing in concrete blocks. During the week, the few laborers who are permanently here are building the walls, that is when they are not preparing other floors to be built. But it all goes up fairly quickly. I haven't seen any plumbing yet (other than the well at the ground floor, nor any electrical, other than the panel and the lights in the small room the workers use there.

I'll follow this up with more info as I capture the progress. The photos (and more) are located in this set on Flickr.