Sri Lanka It's Happening

March 17, 2007

Finally on monday, we started brick work on the house that I am building. It has taken us a good six weeks to get to this stage. Having a somewhat complex foundation was the primary cause. We decided to go for a costly strip footing instead of the more traditional rubble foundation because there are two blind walls at the boundaries.

Someday, the owners of the adjoining plots of land will start building too and with a rubble foundation that could lead to settling and cracks. That however does not happen with a strip because it is the whole strip that settles. With a rubble foundation each column settles on it's own. In fact the day where the adjoining lands are built on is not far away. There are three plots around my block and the owner of one of them started work on the same day that we did. The owner of the second block did the site layout yesterday!

Brickwork goes much faster than foudation work so we have already built upto 5 feet right around the perimeters. All around except for one little bit. There is a section where two different strips were supposed to be joined by another beam. Unfortunately it had not been done properly.
Three people who should have noticed (me, the consultant and the contractor) didn't.

While flipping through the diagrams (there are plenty of them), I suddenly noticed a beam detail on a rather cluttered page, and asked myself 'how come I didn't see this being built?' the answer is because it wasn't built. So we have dug up the area and again and the beam is being done up again. It's fortunate that I noticed it before the brickwork was done on that area. Otherwise we would have had to demolish the wall too.

Posted by raditha at March 17, 2007 2:55 PM