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This blog can be also found at this link, Australia affordable houses.
Welcome to my article,
Dear readers, as I have said, I was working building these affordable houses. In those times, new affordable houses were built on the fringe of the city in new suburbs, which is the same as today, if you want a new affordable house, you must look for it, in the new suburbs.
As we know, houses
are not all the same, because houses come in a variety of styles and sizes. Of
course, we want to live in the best houses available, but most of us cannot
afford expensive houses, therefore, we should be happy to live in any house
that we can afford to buy or rent.
For this reason of
affordability, to satisfy the house supply market, there are several types of
house that are being built at any given time. In this article, we are talking about the type of houses that I worked on, in the early sixties.
In the early
sixties, I ended up working on average houses that the working class could
afford to buy, or at least the aim of the builders that were building them, was
based in this affordability, since they had designed them with this purpose,
because in the end, even though they had been built cheap not all of us workers
would afford to buy these types of houses. But anyhow this was the purpose of
building these types of affordable houses in the early sixties.
I guess that today
is the same, some builders, build these affordable houses at the outskirt of
any town or city, since the blocks of land are cheaper to buy.
Now let us try to describe
how we were building these houses from scratch.
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Building houses from scratch.
Anyhow, I am
writing these articles about building, because I want to
tell you the story of my life. But at
the same time, I want to write something useful for my readers, and I believe
that knowing how houses are built is useful to know, since knowing a few things
about building houses comes handy at times; you see, we live in houses, we want to know as much as we can about them. Because we need to
know how to do it yourself repairs and other things, since houses need to be maintained,
if we want to enjoy them fully. So, I am going to describe how these houses
were built, with as many details as I can, so that anyone interested can learn
something useful from these building articles.
Anyhow, I was working in the building industry with this
Italian builder, which was good for me because my native language is Italian.
Now, with this builder not only we were re-stumping or building rooms under the
existing houses, which required a lot of work to be done by hand, but we were
building new houses from scratch. As I have said at the beginning of the
sixties most of the digging were done by hand, specially the type of work that
we were doing on these new houses, as machines were expensive to hire then, So,
they were used only, if there was a lot of digging to be done, and with the
machines of those days we could only dig straight forward things and not small
detailed digging, as they were required to build these houses, anyhow as I
said, I did a lot of this digging work myself, as I was employed as builder
labor, and this was one of the jobs that I had to do.
Therefore now, let
us imagine that I have finished digging the foundation and the stump holes for
this new house, and now, we need to lay concrete in the foundation, and to
concrete the stumps foundation and the stumps themselves. So, let us go over
what we had to do, because in those times these things were all done by hand
and started from scratch.
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Making your own
concrete.
Making your own
concrete on site from scratch
Let me explain, what is meant by concrete in buildings and how it is made. You see, it is useful to know how to make your own concrete, so that you understand what is required and how it must be done. Some people can say that today things are different, so why bother to tell us this stuff about how to mix concrete properly, when we can buy concrete ready mixed by truckload, or in bags and all you need to do is to add water to make concrete. I say, okay, you can do that. But there are times and places, when you must do these things the old way.
Therefore, it is helpful to know how concrete is made from scratch, because
that is the only way if you don’t want to make mistakes. Therefore, let me tell
you how we were mixing our concrete in the sixties, and what is required to do
that and how it is supposed to be done, if you want a good job done and the
concrete to last a long time.
By the way, here we
need to clarify what is meant by the word concrete, because most
people replace it with the word cement. On building sites, the word concrete
means the element mixed together able to harden to a solid consistency within a
certain length of time, therefore, it has got to be done the right way.
One of the most
important things while mixing concrete is that the concrete must be well mixed
and to a workable consistency using the least amount of water possible, because
if too much water is used then the concrete becomes weaker, therefore, it must
be done properly.
Usually concreting and other jobs are done according to its specifications, you see, any firm that makes building plans, for a house or something of more importance, they must write also the specification how the job needs to be done. In these specifications it will be written what material to use, how to use it and the quantity and quality required. Therefore, to concrete a foundation for an average small house, the specification could state that the concrete must be mixed to a consistency at least 1 to 6; this means that to mix the concrete you should use 1 part of Portland cement 2 parts of river sand and 4 parts of gravel (aggregate) and mix it as required until an even consistency is achieved. For the stumps usually would be a bit more cement than the foundations.
Now let us say that
we are ready to start mixing the first batch of concrete, as we have made
everything ready, and everything has been delivered. To make concrete you need
at least four elements of materials plus clean water; 1 Portland cement, 2
washed river sand, 3 clean or washed gravel and 4 reinforcement steel rods, and
it is helpful if you have a mixer if you have to mix a large amount of
concrete, because to mix by hand is hard work and the concrete needs to be well
mixed.
Now let us start
the mixer and make the first batch, while the mixer is turning around, the very
first thing you put in the mixer is water, one must be careful not to put too
much water to start with, it has got to be just enough to mix everything to a
certain consistency, so let us say that we put 8 litres of water (the amount of
water can be different, since it depends on the amount of water that is already
in the (sand gravel) aggregate) then we put in the mixer cement, next is the
river sand twice as much as the cement and then the clean gravel 4 time as much
as the cement; here the mixer is going around and mixing everything together.
Please note, that
if you change the way you put your materials in the mixer, from what I have
described above, you may have different result, and usually it would take
longer to mix everything properly and to the right consistency.
For people that do
this job all the time it is easy for them to see if the concrete that is being
mixed has the right consistency required, once you know this, if it is too dry
just add a bit of water and if it is too wet you should add a bit of everything
else. There you are it is not too hard if you know how to do it.
What I have written
above applies only to house building of less importance, for building that are
large and important the concrete needs to be to a very high standard and
specifications, so, here again you need to know what is needed before you do
anything.
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This is a concrete or mortar mixer, with this mixer you can make a wheelbarrow full of concrete each time, if you know how it is done, it will take 5 to 10 minutes for a batch.
What is shown above is called concrete blend. It is washed river sand and gravel mixed together already. So, you do not need to have two separate hips. Anyhow it all depends what you need to do.
Concrete requires teamwork.
To concrete and do a fair amount of work you need a team, even if it is a
small team. Our team was usually three of us, I as builder labor, John as
bricklayer and Con the contractor who was a bricklayer and concrete layer. We didn’t
mind if we switched around a bit to do the job. So, I was on the mixer
mixing the concrete, John was with a wheelbarrow taking the concrete from the
mixer to the foundations, and Con was fixing the
concrete in place.
Fixing the concrete for the foundation was physically the lightest job, when we were mixing the concrete with this mixer on site, but it is the most responsible job, because while concreting the foundations, you must make sure that the steel rods reinforcement was in the right position, at the same time you had to pack the concrete down and then the concrete in the foundations has to be finished level, this was easy when the ground was level, but when the ground was not level, it was necessary that steps were made and they had to be to gauge, which was equal to the thickness of one or two laid bricks or more, or the thickness of a laid block, if blocks were going to be used to build the walls on this foundation, whatever was going to be used to lay on the foundations, we had to try to make an adjustment while we were laying the foundations; therefore, this was the job for the experts, but mixing concrete using a mixer was a slow job, so, the bloke that was fixing concrete had enough time to do his job right.
What I have written is how we used to lay small house foundations in the early sixties, which
are the same as we lay foundations today, except that today we order concrete
already mixed, but we have to be ready with everything and everything has got
to be in the right place, because the concrete ready-mix truck will unload its
concrete quickly, so, there is no time to do anything else except to fix the
concrete at the right level as quickly as possible.
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When the building site is not level, you may have to have stepped foundation, if you have to lay bricks on the foundation, it would be helpful to make steps that are equal to one course or several courses of bricks.
The figure above shows a short concrete stump with ants capping. All stumps under a timber house must have an ant capping on them, to stop ants and crawling insect enter the building that way.
Concreting stumps on site.
Now let me go back to the early sixties, when we were concreting stumps on site, this
procedure is not done much today, the reasons for this change it is because the
buildings have changed, and today these stumps can be made in a concrete
factory, and when cured can be delivered to the building site, where the worker
can erect them as required.
To concrete these
stumps on site we had steel forms of various length, and these forms were
assembled together with steel pins, so, we would assemble these steel forms and
then start to mix concrete, we had also make sure that the stumps foundations
were exactly in the right place by using the marked profiles and tight line
between them.
In this case, it
was an easy for the fellow that is mixing concrete, but a lot harder for
the blokes that had to pour the concrete in the stumps form-work and make sure
that the stump was exactly in the right place and finished at the right height
and were plumb (perfect vertical position). It was also necessary that
some reinforcing rods were placed in the right position with a purpose made
devise. These are how we made those onsite stumps in the sixties.
These concrete stumps that we made in the sixties were better that the timber stumps that they were replacing, because they did not rot with the passing of time and the white ants could not eat them. Here we can say that these concrete stumps on site were easy to make, if you knew the procedure, in fact it was easier to make a set of stumps than to fix concrete stumps made in the factory, as there is no heavy lifting involved.
I believe that we have said enough in this article, as we have explained the work that we did on these affordable houses and we will be coming back to talk about more building work in our next article, house building in Brisbane. To see more click on this link, Australia affordable houses.
See you soon.
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