A real family effort this one and whilst it is quite a large structure, it does go up relatively easily. My wife stained the wood before installation, quite a meticulous job, with two of my children helping put up the structure itself. The only problem I did encounter, was when…
Just back from the south of France and we received a lead of concrete for the slabs on either side of the pool house and also at the rear of the pool to finish off the overflows nicely.
We are back out again for about a month, but will spend some time in the south of the country celebrating a birthday. The first job on this trip has been to remove the old fruit cages and the concrete slab that used to be in front of the tractor…
Test installation of the firepit in top void of the wall is successful. It was a little windy and too light to get the full effect in the photo, but is going to be great at night! Next up was to finished the pointing of the stone tiles on the…
One of the main jobs to do whilst out in France for a couple of weeks was to install the finished materials on the feature wall and render the other exposed concreate walls. A bit of a labour of love and definitely a family effort, it took around two days…
That is all of the work complete for this trip and with four concrete pours completed, 26.5m3 in total, it has been a real success, despite the little setback and upset at the formwork giving way on the first attempt. Sail-shade posts can be seen in place, but they are…
The biggest concrete pour of the build, with 14 cubic metres being poured using the long reach pump truck (28m arm). My daughter is tamping the concrete with the 2m metal bar to help bring the ‘cream’ to the top and sink any aggregate, leaving a nice smooth finish. The…
With the formwork off the front of the feature wall, we have been able to finish preparing the pool terrace slab for pouring. The walls of the pool and surrounding steps / retaining walls have all been tied together using rebar chemically set and tied to the wire sheets of…
Second time lucky! Almost every spare 10 minutes that I had this week was spent trying to find and implement ways to make the formwork for the feature wall stronger. This meant adding additional wooden braces at corners, extra pallets and blocks for support, etc. Glad to say all of…
Apart from adding additional support to the feature wall formwork, following the disaster on Monday, we have been busy getting the slab ready for pouring next week. My daughter has been busy laying membrane and then we have fitted the drains at the correct heights. S-Shaped spacers set the height…