RC beam or Ringbeam. preparation , drainage,rebar and shuttering

Finally getting around updating this. It s been a while. There has been some standstill on site for a few months as life just been busy elsewhere. But with the whole covid situation , I decided to get foundations done. 

After all pile where in, I started to buy a lot of rebar from my local scrap yard back in December to tie up my cages . As so often , I am more clever then everybody else and wanting to get everything cheaper/better- I m making my life harder then it needs to be. You call a person like this advise-resistant I think. Sometimes this is the right approach.sometimes it isn't . With buying rebar from scrap places , the idea was good , but the result : not that much .

I ended up with a real mix and match of various thicknesses which later on became a slight problem for the building control sign off. 

So in retrospect I should have listened and bought the matching rebar (even if from a scrappy) . Buying the stirrups/links ready bent would have been a much better idea as well instead of bending them myself . But you learn as you go along. 

The next step when restarting the site in February was to fly my experienced digger driving father-in-law in and have him digging out the trenches in 1day. 

Again , vital mistake not thinking long enough about levels of the trenches , which caused some extra work down the line. 

so trenches all done to perfection . Just not to perfect level(my fault )

This was the end of the winter and we had a few months break to avoid working in the mud . 

And then Corona happened. 

Restart the site with diggin out the drainage and trying to connect to old clay pre existing drainage pipes:

Got myself some help with more experience in the process which proofs very essential in some parts. 

Decided that the trenches we dug in February needed to be backfilled to get RC beam on a level without steps. (Site is sloped in 2 directions , so options where diggin out more -without space to put spoil or get rid of it, or backfill and build up the parts that are too low )

Took a week to get that done by hand . 

But had it all on a level including building up a bank next to the stream 

So only laying out the rebar cages and tying them together was left . A bit of boxing up and that s it.

Turned out the cages I premade in the winter where shit 

And took a fair time to put "right" (it s hard to polish a turd)

So apart from underestimating a few bits and having to work around another few. 

A couple of major misunderstandings of me regarding the building regs. And an unintended above ground groundbeam (which takes way way more work and timber than expected :

Everything is fairly good .

Building control still scratching their heads with this odd customer. 

But life would be boring if we all built Bovis houses .