Fern House

To screen the clay retaining wall behind container we decided to use system with aluminium posts that have slots to slide timber between them. For posts we had to dig 50cm deep holes and than mix ready mix ‘fastcrete’ concrete with water directly inside the holes.

And here they are, posts ready for the timber

Time to pour concrete for the foundations of timber piles…

It’s been raining since we mounted formatubes and some of them became soft, but we took the risk of pouring concrete into them as we don’t have enough formatubes left to replace all of them and everytime we take them out the soil falls into the holes so the longer we wait the worse it is.

And again we had to pump out the water from holes and the pump overheated in the meantime so it was a lot of pressure to get it done before the pump and concrete arrived.

Here we go…

 

 

For most of the time we were too busy to take pictures. I was keeping the tubes as some of them were so short that under concrete pressure they just jumped out from the holes and Cosmin was vibrating the concrete. This time the vibrator we hired was much stronger (petrol vibrator rather than electric one we had previously) which also didn’t help with stability of formatubes. Also the supports for posts we made were not strong enough…. so some disasters happened….

As you can see they are clearly not aligned…. well another lesson from ‘expectations vs reality’ series.

We used wash out from the pump to strengthen our driveway, hope it helps for a while.

We almost succeeded to secure all openings from rain by covering them with the foil….. the front one, which is facing south was impossible to cover as wind was immediately taking out whatever fixings we tried to fix it with…. so in front we just secured the floor and it will have to suffice for now.

Back opening…

… and front opening…

 

A big day has come… our 40ft container is coming on site today.

It was quite stressful as it was raining quite a lot recently and our driveway is a bit soft so we didn’t know if the crane can climb up to the top.

And the deal with the crane companies is that you pay upfront and than even if the crane cannot make it it was on your site so the money is taken. Luckily the crane made it and our platform was big enough and hard enough for it to support lifting.

Also before the container came we send the image with position of container on the truck to avoid rotating container in the air as it might be risky to rotate 12m container above neighbors properties 😉  I also didn’t want to risk damaging the fern tree so it was good that container came with the cuts on the side we wanted.

The truck have to reverse and make quite tricky turn, so it takes few tries before it can make it. In the meantime our neighbour is making her tai chi exercises not impressed with what is going on around. Other neighbours were more impressed and gathered to watch what’s happening as it’s not everyday that you see 40ft container flying in the air 😉

Cables needed some lifting as well…

and here we go, first obstacles passed…

Now the truck couldn’t make it up the slope on our soft driveway so quite unexpectedly we needed digger’s help. We were super lucky that Carl was in the neighbourhood and showed up within 15 min from the call. I had no idea that the digger can pull such a big truck with container on it. Super impressed with Carl’s skills and the digger’s power!

In the meantime Petone Engineering team was welding some additional plates.

From this perspective it looks huge!

Keeping our container on leash…

Final adjustments and alignment check…

And here it is, our upper container is officially placed.

View from living space…

from kitchen…

… and bedroom

Signing painful crane bill… and now it can leave the site.

It’s also good that upper container came the right colour. It was painted just before it was delivered to us, we have been told it was painted the same morning. Good thing about it is that we won’t have to wait another few weeks for ‘good weather slot’ for it to be painted on site and we can start working on placing the windows. The down side is that when the bottom of container was painted it must have been placed on ground before it dried so we have a lot of gravel and dirt sicked to the bottom of container, which at the certain point we will have to clean…. and paint… again.

And here are both of our containers stacked compared with the rendering we made last year, it looks so much better in reality, isn’t it?

It was financially painful to find out that our upper 40ft container cannot be placed with Hiab and we will need to hire a crane. It is not only crane itself that is very expensive, but we have to make some unexpected earthworks to make a flat platform for it as well.

Picture from series ‘what we thought vs what we got’ 😉

Plus we had to add some basecourse to make a clay more stable.

Taking advantage of few days of sun, we managed to put farmatubes that we have previously removed due to weather (they are just glued carton so after few days of rain they might start dissolving) and the rest of the posts in place.

Some of our prolam posts are 6m long, not an easy task to put them into a hole.

Fixing formatubes and posts.

Final check..

… and we can call it a day.

I  was far too excited yesterday to be sure if my worries about the wrong colour of container are right and I was hoping I’m wrong but unfortunately no….. the container is wrong colour and it will have to be painted on site… hopefully soon, as without it we cannot install doors and thermoclick panel.

After contacting Boxman – our container supplier, and getting confirmation that they will paint it as soon as they get correct paint shipped from Christchurch to Wellington, we have no other choice than accept it and move forward to painting the roof with liquid rubber to get ready for 40ft container that will go on the top.

Taking advantage of good weather we managed to paint the roof with two layers as required

 

After a lot of stress and delays finally the time has come!

20ft container arrived on site… with 1,5 hour delay from scheduled time but at least it’s here!

We waited a long time for this moment…

The truck has to come as close as possible to reach the place.

Than it has to be stabilised by expanding hydraulic outrigger legs

Now we can mount twistlocks ‘on the fly’

And here we go, let’s put it in place…

It needs a bit of pushing…

Almost there…

After few small adjustments it’s on it’s place and ready for welding.
Hayden and Chris from Petone Engineering did a great job helping is to align container in the position to make sure it makes a square with 40ft container that will go on top.

Unfortunately not everything went perfectly right…

This middle leg was supposed to be under the beam 😉
We knew it was a bit off, as during the pouring, pump guys filled the tube up to top with concrete and those ones were supposed to be up to marking not top. So when Cosmin was vibrating concrete and I was toweling it they moved the leg slightly to take concrete surplus with shovel and when I got to it concrete was way too hard to move anything anymore there… well and it looks like we got it off more than we thought anyway…

We will have to ask Derek, our structure engineer from Kerslake and Partners what can we do about it…

Anyway it fills like big progress and we start having some shapes there…

We are super glad that we did drainage and put gravel under container, it’s so much cleaner and nicer to work around it now, and we don’t have standing water under retaining wall any more so…. it works 🙂

That was a long and exciting day 🙂

 

As we don’t have too much space behind lower container we decided to put the drain in front of clay retaining wall rather than ‘classic’ drain behind the wall. So when Cosmin was chipping concrete I started digging the trench….

we got metal pea and punched drainage pipe…

when the trench had correct slope we put geotextile under container space to separate clay from metal pea to have nice and clean space under containers

cutting holes in geotextile for piles

we created nice walkable, clean space

to provide double layer of clay protection we put punched drainage pipe into a sleeve

now is the time for metal pea cover

wrapping geotextile around the draiage and pinning it down

after many wheelbarrows of metal pea, we have tidy and hopefully drained space for our lower container

 

Today was verification day for our level measurements, and well we got it ALMOST right 😉

Awesome guys from Petone Engineering fixed steel legs and plates…. to make the levels right we will have to get rid of twistlocks at the back of longer container, chip 35mm of concrete for one of the posts and get 3 additional plates…. not too bad as for first time setout with bubble leveling tools

We didn’t make it with all 26 piles to be poured today, but at least we can pour 10 that go under containers so we don’t have to postpone their arrival.

Looks like it was busy morning not only for us but for the whole industry in the region and at 7:30am there we no more vibrators for renting. Fortunately after a bit of hassle Cosmin got one. It was very stressful morning as we still had a lot of work before pouring at 1pm. We had to secure the tubes, seal them at the bottoms,  place all the steel fixings and hang reinforcing on them to make sure it doesn’t move during concrete pouring. We didn’t even have times to take pictures until the pump arrived.

and this is how our pile looks just after the pour

Vibrating concrete to get the air out…

and surface troweling…

It was very, very long day…