This is what the contractor calls ‘The Braid’. It’s concrete reinforcement steel or rebar as it’s often called, at least in the US. It took five men nearly two days to complete the structure, and the picture above is after the first day. You can see the special pieces here designed to fit into the inkassing. You can also see the piles have been filled with concrete and also have steel reinforcements coming out of the tops.
Below is a picture of the same part of the wall, but from more of a distance. This picture was also taken the second day after they finished. You can see it’s been built up in layers and in many places, especially connecting the rows of piles, you can see extra reinforcing material was added to give strength in specific places. This was all very carefully and mathematically planned by the construction engineer.
This last picture is almost the same as the previous, but you can see the extra lines of reinforcement a little better.
Tomorrow the concrete will be poured, and what’s called the construction floor will be made. After this happens our house will have it’s new foundation and will finally be stabilized! In total the construction floor will be about a foot or 30cm thick, and on top of that we’ll put a layer of insulation, floor heating and finally a finished tile floor.
Until now we’ve been enjoying walking around in the space with it’s high ceilings, and it’ll be a shame to lose the extra height to the thick floor. We will actually gain about a foot (30cm) of height compared with what was there before, but to put the new floor in deeper than that would have been too expensive, because it would have meant working under the water table.
The other thing that’s critical about this stage of the project is that once the concrete is poured into the inkassing it can never be undone, so tomorrow when they pour the concrete it will be an irreversible step.
That is a lot of rebar. It will be very strong indeed. Then the walls next?
Hi Randy,
That’s a good question. I’m not sure what’s next.
Still to be done is a ‘stability portal’, that’s a steel bar with supports on each end a lot like what’s replaced my load bearing wall, and was in some recent pictures. In fact, the steel bar that replaced the load bearing wall is a stability portal, and stabilizes the house front to back, but I need another in the back wall to give side to side stability.
Also to be done is to build special walls, what they call a ‘basement box’. This will go around the entire edge of the new floor and be about 1.5 meters high. I think these walls will in effect be reinforced concrete like the floor, and they are intended to keep moisture from penetrating. Right now the ground floor is always damp, and that makes it unusable for many things, for example as a bedroom. This is intended to solve that problem. In fact we’ve really only used it as workspace for exactly this reason.
There is some rebar sticking up from the floor in these pictures along the sides, and I think this is for the moisture resistant walls. It looks too like they are leaving a gap at the top of the inkassing, perhaps so the concrete from these walls can flow in a bit.
After these things they need to change some windows and doors around, put in a floor and do the rest of the finishing work.