Welcome to my article,
Dear readers, as I
have said in our last blog, I was working building these affordable houses.
In those times, new affordable houses were built on the fringe of the city in
new suburbs, which is the same as today, if you want a new affordable house,
you must look for it, in the new suburbs.
We were also talking about
earning and saving money, one of the aims for saving money is to buy our own
house. So, let us talk the houses that we can afford.
As we know, houses
are not all the same. Of
course, we want to live in the best houses available, but most of us cannot
afford expensive houses, therefore, we should be happy to live in any house
that we can afford to buy or rent.
For this reason of affordability,
to satisfy the house supply market, there are several types of house that are
being built at any given time. In this article, we are going to talk about the
type of houses that I ended up working on, in the early sixties. Because this
article is meant to cover the story of my life, and what I did for a living.
In the early sixties, I ended up working on average houses that the working class could afford to buy, or at least the aim of the builders that were building them, was based in this affordability, since they had designed them with this purpose, because in the end, even though they had been built cheap not all of us workers would afford to buy these types of houses. But anyhow this was the purpose of building these types of affordable houses in the early sixties.
Now let us try to describe
how we were building these houses from scratch.
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Building houses from scratch
Anyhow, I am
writing these articles about building houses from scratch, because I want to
tell you the story of my life, and what I did when I came to Australia. But at
the same time, I want to write something useful for my readers, and I believe
that knowing how houses are built is useful to know, since knowing a few things
about building houses comes handy at times; you see, we live in houses,
therefore, we want to know as much as we can about them. Because we need to
know how to do it yourself repairs and other things, since houses need to be maintained,
if we want to enjoy them fully. So, I am going to describe how these houses
were built, with as many details as I can, so that anyone interested can learn
something useful from these building articles.
Now has I have
explained in our last article, I was working in the building industry with this
Italian builder, which was good for me because my native language is Italian.
Now, with this builder not only we were re-stumping or building rooms under the
existing houses, which required a lot of work to be done by hand, but we were
building new houses from scratch. As I have said at the beginning of the
sixties most of the digging were done by hand, specially the type of work that
we were doing on these new houses, as machines were expensive to hire then, So,
they were used only, if there was a lot of digging to be done, and with the
machines of those days we could only dig straight forward things and not small
detailed digging, as they were required to build these houses, anyhow as I
said, I did a lot of this digging work myself, as I was employed as builder
labor, and this was one of the jobs that I had to do.
Therefore now, let
us imagine that I have finished digging the foundation and these stump holes for
this new house, and now, we need to lay concrete in the foundation, and to
concrete the stumps foundation and the stumps themselves. So, let us go over
what we had to do, because in those times these things were all done by hand
and started from scratch.
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Making your own
concrete.
Making your own
concrete on site from scratch. Anyhow today you might think that this is an old way of mixing concrete, and it may not be used much. But if you happen to be in the middle of nowhere, this is what you need to know to make concrete.
So, let me explain, what
is meant by concrete in buildings and how it is made You see, if during your life,
you are going to do renovations, it is useful to know how to make your own
concrete, so that you understand what is required and how and why it must be
done in certain ways, you will find this information written in this article.
Some people can say that today things are different, so why bother to tell us
this stuff about how to mix concrete properly, when we can buy concrete ready
mixed by truckload, or in bags and all you need to do is to add water to make
concrete. I say, okay, you can do that. But there are times and places, when
you must do these things the old way.
Therefore, I
believe that you still need to know how concrete is made from scratch, because
that is the only way if you don’t want to make mistakes. Therefore, let me tell
you how we were mixing our concrete in the sixties, and what is required to do
that and how it is supposed to be done, if you want a good job done and the
concrete to last a long time.
By the way, here we
need to clarify one thing, what is meant by the word concrete, because most
people replace it with the word cement. On building sites, the word concrete
means the element mixed together able to harden to a solid consistency within a
certain length of time, therefore, it has got to be done the right way.
One of the most
important things while mixing concrete is that the concrete must be well mixed
and to a workable consistency using the least amount of water possible, because
if too much water is used then the concrete becomes weaker, therefore, it must
be done properly.
Usually concreting
and other jobs are done according to its specifications, you see, any firm that
makes building plans, for a house or something of more importance, they must
write also the specification how the job needs to be done. In these
specifications it will be written what material to use, how to use it and the
quantity and quality required. Therefore, to concrete a foundation for an
average small house, the specification could state that the concrete must be
mixed to a consistency at least 1 to 6; for people that knew this it meant that
to mix the concrete you should use 1 part of Portland cement 2 parts of river
sand and 4 parts of gravel (aggregate) and mix it as required until an even
consistency is achieved. For the stumps usually would be a bit more cement than
the foundations. But I must say that sometimes even these rules had to be
changed a bit depending on the material that can be delivered on that local
site.
Now let us say that
we are ready to start mixing the first batch of concrete, as we have made
everything ready, and everything has been delivered. To make concrete you need
at least four elements of materials plus clean water; 1 Portland cement, 2
washed river sand, 3 clean or washed gravel and 4 reinforcement steel rods, and
it is helpful if you have a mixer if you have to mix a large amount of
concrete, because to mix by hand is hard work and the concrete needs to be well
mixed.
Now let us start
the mixer and make the first batch, while the mixer is turning around, the very
first thing you put in the mixer is water, one must be careful not to put too
much water to start with, it has got to be just enough to mix everything to a
certain consistency, so let us say that we put 8 litres of water (the amount of
water can be different, since it depends on the amount of water that is already
in the (sand gravel) aggregate) then we put in the mixer cement, next is the
river sand twice as much as the cement and then the clean gravel 4 time as much
as the cement; here the mixer is going around and mixing everything together.
Please note, that
if you change the way you put your materials in the mixer, from what I have
described above, you may have different result, and usually it would take
longer to mix everything properly and to the right consistency.
For people that do
this job all the time it is easy for them to see if the concrete that is being
mixed has the right consistency required, once you know this, if it is too dry
just add a bit of water and if it is too wet you should add a bit of everything
else. There you are it is not too hard if you know how to do it.
What I have written
above applies only to house building of less importance, for building that are
large and important the concrete needs to be to a very high standard and
specifications, so, here again you need to know what is needed before you do
anything, and if necessary consult the expert.
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Concrete requires teamwork.
To concrete well
and do a fair amount of work on these houses you need a team, even if it is a
small team. Our team was usually three of us, I as builder labor, John as
bricklayer and Con the contractor who was a bricklayer and concreted. We didn’t
mind if we switched around a bit to do the job. So, I was usually on the mixer
mixing the concrete, one was with a wheelbarrow taking the concrete from the
mixer to the foundations that we were concreting, and one was fixing the
concrete in place.
Fixing the concrete
for the foundation was physically the lightest job, when we were mixing the
concrete with this mixer on site, but it is the most responsible job, because
while concreting the foundations, you must make sure that the steel rods
reinforcement was in the right position, at the same time you had to pack the
concrete down and then the concrete in the foundations has to be finished
level, this was easy when the ground was level, but when the ground was not
level, it was necessary that steps were made and they had to be to gauge, which
was equal to the thickness of one or two laid bricks or more, or the thickness
of a laid block, if blocks were going to be used to build the walls on this
foundation, whatever was going to be used to lay on the foundations, we had to
try to make an adjustment while we were laying the foundations; therefore, this
was the job for the experts, at that time it was not that hard, because mixing
by hand even using a mixer was a slow job, so, the bloke that was fixing the
concrete had enough time to do his job right.
What I have written
above is how we used to lay small house foundations in the early sixties, which
are the same as we lay foundations today, except that today we order concrete
already mixed, but we have to be ready with everything and everything has got
to be in the right place, because the concrete ready-mix truck will unload its
concrete quickly, so, there is no time to do anything else, except to fix the
concrete at the right level as quickly as possible.
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Concreting stumps on site
Now let me go back
again to the early sixties, when we were concreting these stumps on site, this
procedure is not done much today, the reasons for this change it is because the
buildings have changed, and today these stumps can be made in a concrete
factory, and when cured can be delivered to the building site, where the worker
can erect them as required.
To concrete these
stumps on site we had steel forms of various length, and these forms were
assembled together with steel pins, so, we would assemble these steel forms and
then start to mix concrete, we had also make sure that the stumps foundations
were exactly in the right place by using the marked profiles and tight line
between them.
In this case, it
was an easy job for the fellow that is mixing concrete, but a lot harder for
the blokes that had to pour the concrete in the stumps form-work and make sure
that the stump was exactly in the right place and finished at the right height
and were also plumb (perfect vertical position). It was also necessary that
some reinforcing rods were placed in the right position with a purpose made
devise. These are how we made those onsite stumps in the sixties.
These concrete stumps that we made in the sixties were better that the timber stumps that they were replacing, because it was an improvement as they did not rot with the passing of time and the white ants could not eat them. Here we can say that these concrete stumps on site were easy to make, if you knew the procedure, in fact it was easier to make a set of stumps than to fix concrete stumps made in the factory, as there is no heavy lifting involved.
I believe that we
have said enough in this article, as we have explained the work that we did on these
affordable houses and we will be coming back to talk about more building work
in our next article, house building in Brisbane. See you soon.
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