After the columns had been erected and concreted into place the next job was to connect them together with the ground beams. This was going to be a long slow job as each ground beam had at least 6 pieces of rebar, most of them had 7. And there were just over 200 linear meters of ground beam ! So that was around 1.4 kms of rebar that had to be fed through the uprights, the casings and then tied all together. When I added up the total rebar, including the footings and the columns, we had used around 3 kilometers of DB12 rebar. Plus all the smaller casings at 6mm (?) at 20*10 every 15cm for the ground beams….70cm at 6/m * 200=840m, plus the columns at 10*10…50cm at 6/m * 4.5m * 40 columns is approx. another 540 meter. Which totals well over 4km of rebar used in this house, sounds incredible doesn’t it?

At least we are helping to keep the Chinese steel mills and the iron ore mines back home in Australia busy.

Finally, after several days, it was all assembled and time to start on the formwork beginning with the laundry/storage/gym building and then moving on to the main house after those beams had been poured.

And after a couple more days the forms were removed from the beams, and more shuttering for the columns sprouted up:

And then each column was filled, bucket by bucket :

After a couple of days the shuttering is removed, and the columns wrapped in plastic to slow down the curing process …slow is good !

Finally, all is revealed (looking from laundry door across the side verandah) ;

Now that the skeleton of the house is complete, it is time to start filling in between the beams.

Several truckloads of soil were brought in, spread around by a tractor, and then compacted by soaking thoroughly and then by machine (an unusual sight in rural Thailand!) :

And then when it was thoroughly compacted it was time for the slab to be poured. That’s a big job so the outbuilding, carport and verandahs were done first, and the main part of the house the next day. Altogether it was 17 “cubes” (cubic meters) of readymix used for the slab.

So after working day #31 the major part of the concreting is done, now to let it cure for a few days before the steel crew take over for the roof building. As I go out there to water the garden every morning I also hosed down the concrete to aid in the curing …slow is good !

So that takes us up to the present, next up in episode 4 will be the roof frame…stay tuned !