Week 3, Day 1 – Foundation concrete:

• On some days, the team focus their energies on things that aren’t particularly visible: researching options for improving the design, comparing prices from different suppliers, arranging deliveries or completing intricate preparations for later steps. On other days the progress is a lot more apparent; today was one of those other days…
• Following all of the preparation of the foundation trenches the concrete got poured today, using some big bits of plant:
  • A concrete boom pump for easy access to the trenches at the south of the house, over 15m from the driveway.
    • The thing I found most impressive was the degree of control the operator had over the position of the delivery pipe, using the remote control. He was able to manoeuvre the pipe through the network of trenches, barely touching the sides. I suspect that was as much to do with the skill of the operator as with the capability of the hydraulic control system.
  • A total of 7 concrete deliveries, roughly 55 cubic metres in all.

One of the hourly snapshots from the time-lapse camera caught the first concrete delivery.

Week 3, Day 1

Photos of concrete aren’t the most exciting but here are a few highlights:

Concrete boom pump, manufactured by Putzmeister

Pumping concrete into the shuttering in the old cellar

Keeping the pump fed with concrete

Northern foundation, all finished

Week 3, Day 1 by Marsh Flatts Farm Self Build Diary is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.