Menfranco general blog: Working for this Italian builder

WELCOME TO OUR BLOG, IN ADDITION TO OUR OWN POSTS, WE WILL BE COLLECTING INFORMATION FROM ANY PUBLIC SOURCE, AND BY DOING SO, WE HOPE TO BE ABLE TO SUPPLY SOME USEFUL INFORMATION TO OUR READERS; WE ARE ALSO GOING TO HAVE SOME DO IT YOURSELF POSTS.
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Before commencing work we had to set up the profiles, so that we could know exactly where to start digging the foundations.

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Working for this Italian builder

Working and learning with this small Italian builder

Dear readers, in these writing while I am telling you the story about myself working in the Australian building industry, I am also going to try to give you details of how these building works were done in dose days; therefore if you are one of those people that have in mind to do your own building renovations one day, you can somehow guess what you can find, in those old building that we built then, because you already would know how we built them.

Now let me go back to when I started work with this Italian builder, who was a bricklayer and concreter, we were working on houses and because there was not enough bricklaying work on these houses, as they were mostly built with timber, we were building only the foundations, the concrete stumps and some brickwork as the base of the house. Of course we did also some jobs under the existing houses and this has given me an opportunity to learn many things about those old houses in Brisbane.

Just for comparison sake, so that you could imagine the difference between those times and today, let me describe to you what we did to prepare a new base for a new timber house, which would be setting on concrete stumps and some brick walls.

First of all we went to set up the site, if it was not already set up from the builder or carpenter that would build the timber house. This setting up required that we should fix some timber frame that we called profile to the ground with pegs and according to the measurement in the plan, then mark them accurately, so that we had the right measurement to go by, in order to start digging the foundations for the stumps and brick walls and also for building the whole house.

Then we had to dig the foundations and this was mostly my job as I was the labour and I was pretty good at digging, this may seem hard to believe but even digging one has to be an expert to do a good job, as the shape and depth of the foundations is important to do a job properly. Just to show you what I mean to dig a hole for a new concrete stump, 20x20 centimetres as most stumps were supposed to be; the hole for this stump should be in exactly the right place, it should be sixty centimetres deep in natural ground and at the bottom should have a circumference of at least 40 centimetres or more. These were the average specifications then, unless it was stated otherwise. I know this because I have dug several hundreds of them if not thousands.

All the tools that I needed to do this job were a pick a post hole shovel and a crowbar, it usually would take me a couple of days to dig the entire house holes, which could usually be between twenty and thirty holes. You see I was able to dig a hole in less than half an hour, but it was hard work. Sometimes when there was some brickwork to do we had also to dig these foundations by hand; the foundations were usually dug according to specification, which usually would be 60 centimetre deep in the natural ground, this means that if the grounds had been filled up that filling should not be counted as depth, of course this was the same as the holes we dug for the concrete stumps.

Anyhow, before I finish writing this hub I want to say that those houses that we were helping to build in the sixties with this builder contractor that I was working for were average affordable house that the average family could afford to buy, and therefore they were sold easily.

Now, I believe that I might have said enough in this post and although there could be a lot more that can be said, that part I am going to tell you in my next hub, which is going to be about how we made those concrete stumps on site and other stuff, while we were working on these affordable houses.

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Anyhow before we finish this post I am going to show you something interesting, but they are about today new house, you just have to click on this link below.

Here let us add a link to show you some more Australian houses;