Monday 6 August 2007

[Progress.025] 69 Concrete Piers, all done!

We have a team of 4 trades person working on our site since early 7 am this morning. 2 of them were installing boards around the edge of those white lines drawn last Saturday, while the other 2 used a machine to drill holes.


For the first time, I also uploaded a short 30 second video about the hole drilling process here:

Around 11 am, all the holes at the back were all done, our site supervisor was there recording the depth of all the holes. But as they were a bit behind schedule, we were told to come back around 1pm.

This is the corner of alfresco with 2 sticks shown in yesterday's post, the white square is now a deep hole...

I took this photo around lunch time, this is what the hole-drilling machine looks like.

They continued after a short lunch break.

There were holes everywhere, we start wondering how do they know where to drill?

So there's actually this "Slab plan" (we never seen this) which shows the exact location of where each concrete pier should be located, there were 69 of them, wow! That's a lot!

If you look at the video above, you will see this strange equipment with the top black & white coloured part spinning all the time. I wonder what's that for??

This concrete pump truck has been waiting around the corner since around 1pm. On the window it says: "we love to pump", that was quite cute!

The hole drilling finally finished, and the concrete pumping team of 2 started right away to connect the pipe, and after a concrete mixing truck(what do you call those big truck?) arrived, they start pumping concrete into the holes one by one.


He wore a remote control around his neck to control the pump, and it was really fast compared to the drilling process. Note: he was also answering phone calls on his mobile at the same time in the video below...

The video:

Another big truck arrived later, didn't know we need so much concrete!


In the end they drilled almost double the provisioned linear meter covered in contract and we have to pay around $2600 extra for the concrete piers... Wasn't very happy about this, another unplanned expense...

The whole thing finally finished around 4pm, we were told they will be back tomorrow to start working on the concrete slabs, hopefully all the slabs will be finished end of this week. Our supervisor also ordered the frames and they should be here in about 2 weeks.

Everything is moving very fast, which means time to prepare for next payment....

4 comments:

Perth_Euro said...

That spinning thing is what they call a laser level. (it replaces the old dumpy levels)

It puts out a horizontal beam of laserlight. Somewhere else you will find the "birdy" which is the laser light receiver. (usually attached to a staff or pole)
This birdy beeps at different rates to notify the user when they are at the correct level.

They use it to maintain a horizontal level accross your block.

They also come in adjustable ones, for example to lay sewerage pipes downhill, rather than flat.

hope that helps :o)

timbo

Allan said...

Thanks a lot for the information, that's indeed very helpful!

Anonymous said...

Why did you have to pay extra for the concrete piers?

BuildingOurFirstHouse said...

We have to pay extra because in the contract on a certain "provisioned" linear meter of concrete pier was covered.

No one know how much will be required until the day it's actually been drilled.

The builder then adds up the total linear meter and we have to pay extra for those over what's covered in the contract.