The Ringbeam is in (or above?)

 Finally have some time to take a minute and update this Blog. Not that anyone cares but it s a fun thing to look back to once our House is built. 

This is probably the slowest building site up and down the country. There are a few guys on the Buildhub that compete with me , but i am sure i make it top10 .

We started- as of the last blog entry- digging out trenches in early 2020 with me spending the end of 2019 with preparing Rebar cages to go into the Ringbeam ... 

Once again to anybody thinking about doing it themselves :  Dont . It s not worth it. You wont make a saving. I did try every trick . Got rebar fromscrapyard, done all step myself.. and still barely came in cheaper than just buying the stuff ready made (without even calculating my own time)

So in June 2020 we where finally ready with the Ringbeam bracing and the discussion with Building control about the thickness of the Rebar (thickness varied, we had sections where I used double the requird thickness and sections where i used 4x the required thickness, just because i had massive rebar from the scrapyard - so Building control was not sure if we can use thicker-than-required rebar...result:we can) 

So we ordered the Pump 

Concrete had to be pumped over 70m from the nearest access point so mix was fairly liquid.

The pump team that arrived was absolutely brilliant and helped us massively . Well experienced blokes at Wright Mini ix in Bristol and without them we probably would have much bigger problems than we had.

While pumping we realised that the amount of stress put onto these OSB boards (the shuttering) is enormous. Soemthing any decent Groundworker probably know, we experienced first hand . So we where pumping slowly and raking it in place . This was a backbreaking day for 3 of us (had 1 mate and a brickie that kind of knows what he was doing helping me) and we managed alright up until we got a bit tired in the central/middle section and pumped too much 

result , the shuttering bursted :

So propping that section up as good as possible, we continued to fill the trenches up .

Result was very decent:

And this was the result after a few days when we stroke off the shuttering: 

So this was it, we left it there, just burnt a bit off the shuttering timber and the site was once again on hold for a few months , until early 2021 when i decided to do the Plinths wall around the Ringbeam and repair the Gardenwall that the tree damaged (see earlier post about our lumberjack excursion) 

More to this in the next Blog post when i have some more Photos , but 3 photo i can show and tell something i learned (you can see the plinths block wall around) : 

Wanted to burn some more timber that was just rotting away and though 

"the middle of our foundation is a perfect, secure fireplace....nothing can happen there" 

Little did i know that concrete can explode when getting too hot (e.g. when used as a fireplace) 

So while the fire was going through a mountain of timber, i every now and then(approx. every 10min) heard a loud BANG ... wondering for around 3-4hours what the heck causes that noise until i realised that the fire is slowly eating away our ringbeam .

I stopped feeding the fire and let it cool down to estimate the damage (*see photos left and right from the fire, a little bit of ringbeam is gone) 

Looks like i dodged this bullet and the damage is only on the surface for the 1st 5-7cm and nothing structural .... 

NEXT: Plinths wall , Garden Wall , Bricklaying ...