I spent a few hours on Friday 5th November on my own at the block clearing the landslip away from the back of the garage and tidying everything up. Rapidly working out that our kind of soil really doesn't respond well to getting wet... Sticks together, sticks to the shovel, sticks to your clothes - it just sticks. So that was a fun time.
After a weekend to recover, Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th were slab prep. Monday we spent most of the day leveling the slab fill material - needs to be as close to 100mm from the top all over the slab as possible. Also needed to dig down to the footings around some edges, take a bit extra out in some spots to create a thickened slab (eg. where internal solid block walls are going to go - more on that soon), etc. Today was also the day when the plumbers Darryl, Kurt and Mitch came in for a few hours to dig trenches in the slab fill (yep - the stuff we'd just leveled...) and then lay pipes for sewerage and grey-water (showers/baths/sinks/etc). Has to happen now because slab-fill is easy to dig through, solid concrete is not...
This stage of the build continues to provide days where you work all day long (and there were 7 of us working on-site at some stage during the day, 4 of us a full working day) and by the end of the day everything still looks pretty much the way you found it at the start!
Tuesday made a bit of a difference. With all the preliminaries done the day before we were able to prepare the slabs for a pour. Giant sheets of black PVC builders plastic go down first to create a moisture barrier across the whole slab (great stuff to try to control in any kind of wind - or even a decent breeze - when it's 6 metres long and 4 metres wide...) Would also be great stuff for a water slide... once we get all the bumps ironed out of our slope. Then the reinforcing mesh goes in - 6 x 2.4m grids of iron bar that criss-cross through the entire slab to hold the whole thing together. These get tied to the reinforcing bars sticking out of the foundations; they get tied to each other where they overlap by the specified amount; they get tied everywhere and anywhere. There's extra bits on certain corners for more strength; extra bits anywhere the slab is thicker; extra bits thrown in just for fun... (not quite) until the slab really looks like a serious construction site - and a guaranteed twisted ankle for anyone not watching their step carefully.
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