More Railway Room Progress

Its been a busy week here. Last weekend Father In law Noel, Mate Graham and myself dug all the footings for the railway room slab. The Railway room being included as part of the major extension work, it too had to be put through council and the slab needed to be engineered by an engineer. The usual over engineering the outcome. The slab needed huge 400mm x 400mm footings all round. Where the room extends out from the back line of the house this part of the slab sits on what they call 'filled' land (the back yard is terraced) and as such needed 5 concrete filled piers 400mm diameter and down into natural clays (over 1 meter deep) and so the bottom of the footings bear onto the piers. These piers we done a few months back. At the same time we filled the 'outside' area with crusher dust and compacted it with a whacker packer.
Tuesday we had a mate concreter form and steel up the slab with help from Noel and Myself  and was inspected ready to pour Wednesday. Within the form work is a step down of 160mm x 180mm for the brick course. The 90mm stud wall sits on the top edge of the slab leaving the overall size at 8.850 x 5.770 ( 29 x 19 feet approx). Unfortunately due to the rain, we had to postpone the pour till Friday.


  The concrete needed to be pumped from the front of the house through the garage down the back stairs and into the slab. Considering the amount of water that good old mother nature has dumped around the country we were a bit dubious when we saw the clouds in the sky but luckily we did not get a spit of rain all day, God must be a railway modeller! . By midday Friday the concreter had the helicopter finish the surface. It looks great.

Although this is exciting, I know need to get back upstairs and finish the rest of the house. Oh well, one step closer.......

Ian