On Thursday we continued building the walls as they are very high to keep cool. The other house wasn't as high and had ventilation brick inserted above head height. We never got a satisfactory explanation as to why ours didn't?? This often happens - somehow the query is lost in translation!!
The other house got the floor ready for concreting. They had to chain gang big rocks, sand and little rocks (bigger than gravel) into the floor space which had a depth of abt 2 courses of bricks. Then they had to pound the floor flat and compact the materials.
Meanwhile at our house had to prepare the steel for the concrete beams for the roof. This entailed wiring together( by hand) thinner steel which had been bent into a rectangle over the 4 long lengths of stuff you see in Nz called T- bar (or is it rebar??). The ends of the bar were hooked and the bending took place using a piece of car jack as the lever.
The rectangles of thinner steel were made by bending between nails on a board. All very efficient. However when one of our team members saw them sawing the thinner steel with a hack saw he asked the hfh guy to go and buy some bolt cutters. Once they arrived everyone was v plsed.
The same thing happened at the other house and Bryan generously bought a wheelbarrow. The children apparently had a lot of fun in it when it wasn't in use. These tools become the property of hfh not the homeowners.
More above window beams were completed in the houses. (this consists of a boxing nailed into the brick wall then concrete with rough gravel is tipped in and about an hour later the boxing us removed and bricking continues). So the walls grew. At all times there were jobs for us. No standing around as there has been in all the other places. But there was still time for interaction with the families. Our homeowner could speak a bit of English so we had lots of questions and he could answer most. He was really nice and I hope he achieves his dream of not being a bartender all his life.
Blog by Lynnette
No comments:
Post a Comment