Neighbour's Construction Work - 2021-05-03

 Lots of noisy hole drilling, probably for the concrete piers

[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....

[Progress.022] Excavation will be finished today & piers on next Monday!!

Everything is moving really fast, a lot faster than we expected. Must be the email to the senior management that pushes everything ahead so quickly!

Wife just called, excavation almost done and will definitely finish today! WOW, that's quick.

Also received confirmation from builder that they will do the concrete piers on Monday and we need to take day off from work to be on-site. Yeah! We will have piers very soon!

Quickly checked weather forcast:
Tomorrow 3/8 Friday : showers - lucky we got the excavation done today!
4/8 Saturday: sunny
5/8 Sunday: partly cloudy
6/8 Monday: mostly sunny - excellent!


Getting really excited...

[Others.007] Another Piers Photo, thanks to "vanderlay"

I reported the other day on [Others.008] Have you seen concrete piers before? about some photos for concrete pier.

Thanks to "vanderlay", we now have another photo as shown below. I will certainly post some photos of mine when it's available, if we could have a few shinny days in the coming weeks...


If you are interested in other photos from "vanderlay", please visit this flickr site.

[Others.006] Have you seen concrete piers before?

Tried to upload some photos last night from home, for some reason it always timed out. Will try again tonight...

We have been talking about concrete piers but have no idea what it looks like. Basically it's just big holes drilled on the ground until it reaches rock, and then filled with concrete.

Thanks to "vanderlay" from homeone.com.au forum, I found this blog from "Amber's blog" with some photos about "Concrete Piers". Have a look yourself by clicking here (check for the post on 29/1/2007).

In our tender, concrete piers are listed as "provisional site cost", which means the actual $ will depends on what happened that day. If they have to drill a much deeper hole than expected, we will have to pay the differences. Hopefully this won't happen...