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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;
Cedar Homes: Timber Framed Homes Perth,
WA Timber Homes
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Menfranco general blog
Working for this Italian builder
IS GOING TO BE CONTINUED;
Next time with more works on these building
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