Saturday, March 16, 2013

To top things off . . .

Actual posting date Saturday, March 16, 5:25 p.m. Philippine Time

The house building project has continued at a rate too fast for me to keep up with in this blog.  Even when I do postings about it, I have to skip a lot of photos and then try to keep the story-line as "continuous" as possible. The last photo, published two "issues" before this,  showed the top of the wall, ready to pour some concrete bond-beam around the re-bar fabrication.

The "clutter" makes an interesting lineal-pattern in the photo.
With the concrete blocks, posts and bond-beams completed at the front
of the house, some of the scaffolding is re-set across the middle so that
work can begin on the main truss of the roof.  A large order of custom-
cut lumber arrived in 3 installments via tricycle.  The horizontal timber
closest to top, in photo, is a 3 x 10 20-feet long; its mate is visible as the
 4th horiz. piece counting along the left edge. These are set in place about 4-
feet apart vertically, and the "web"  3 x 6 lumber which joins them is visible
if you follow the first vertical "stick" from the left top edge of the photo.
By the second day of roof-framing, the "purlins" are being secured
across the rafters.  The rafter which is center-left-edge of photo, is
the same one ref'd. to as "stick" above.  You can see where it's attached
to the truss, and the diagonal "Y" brace which stiffens it and shortens its
span.  Meantime, another crew has moved the forms from pouring the
 front bond-beam to the rear of the house to pour the back bond-beam.
(I didn't scamper around on the open roof-frame this time - gettin' OLD.)
When the scaffolding was removed from inside the house, this photo
was taken at the back wall looking towards the front. The main truss
 shows clearly; the tin is already on the front part of the roof. The black
coating applied to wooden pieces is preservative. Tin roofing, standard
here, is secured with 3-inch galvanized twist-shank "umbrella" nails,
which have a washer-like collar just under the nail-head.
The roof structure is secured to the walls at many points by bending
re-bar which is usually a continuation of the re-bar fabrications
embedded in the walls as they are built.

This shows the front roof-overhang, 4-feet. (Tin not on yet, this photo).
 Wide overhangs all around help to shade the house. The right-front corner
post is photo-center, and bond-beams for the front and right side of the house
 project from  its top.  The rough surface of the blocks will help to secure
the smooth-finish cement coating; in fact, hours will be spent roughing-up
 the posts and bond-beams so the smooth-finish cement will stick to them.
The only power tools used up to this point in the construction are a couple
of electric drills used to pre-drill holes for heavy spikes used in the roof.  It
got a little wacky getting power over to the site, as there are 3 types of plug-
ends often-found here; the one you have, never seems to match the cord
you're using. Early in the project we didn't have a long single extension-
cord, but finally bought parts and made one.
As finishing touches went on the roof, bags of sand/gravel mix were
carried in and spread, watered, and tamped - using a piece of tree-trunk
with lumber "handles" attached to thump all the soil down tight and level.
String-lines criss-crossed the floor area to confirm that everything was
"perfect," then the re-bar was laid in place.  The concrete-pour for the
floor took 5 people TWO long workdays to finish, via "ready-MIX" method
 I described a while back.  The resulting floor is extremely smooth and dense. 
A few items often in-use so far: clear plastic hose is filled with water, and
the water-level inside can be used to check whether things are same-height
(level) for as far apart as the length of the hose.  Crowbar, hack-saw and
 cement punch are all made from re-bar; chunk of old garden hose (the
"handle") has a concrete nail through it, used with hammer to chip away
concrete.  Last item is the "umbrella nail" referred to above.
With the roof and the slab completed, the next "house project" blog postings will look at interior and exterior wall finishing and some of the other details I may think about in the meantime.  Bernadette and I have had to travel back and forth to San Jose (provincial capitol) 45 miles away much more than usual lately, so I've accumulated some "road-trip" photos which I may post. We also have looked at two types of vehicles which are specific in the Philippines, and there are some more left to show.  No comment yet about the "rules of the road" here, either - the driving attitude differs from places in the USA - but no time here to go into that, it will be in a later posting. And I had to leave out a lot of other miscellaneous photos, of our nearby neighborhood and of "Tibiao Proper" which is what they call the "central square" area of Tibiao.  So there's still plenty to put up in postings, which I will get to as best I can.
Hope you all have a fine and blessed "weekend" as it appears this will post overnight before Saturday, for you.
Tim and Bernadette Larson,  Philippines

1 comment:

  1. Hey, be sure to add a nice, big bedroom onto your house for me to sleep in when I come visit!

    ReplyDelete