Ready for the Pour

We left home mid morning today, so did not see the full days progress. However, all seemed to be complete, with the cages all in place and, as you can see in the photo, all starter bars for the retaining wall in position :

In fact, I think there are twice as many of the aforementioned bars as necessary. They have placed them at 100mm centres, whereas I think the plans call for 200mm. I do not have them to hand so cannot check at the moment.

There was a brief hiccup later this afternoon, when I took a call from the structural engineer. We were all on our way down the M5 at the time, off for Christmas holidays. The council buildings inspector had called him to mention a couple of things he was not happy with. Nothing too serious, but he asked the structural engineer to make a site visit to see if everything had been done to his satisfaction. He called me back a couple of hours later to say all was well. The concern was over the position of the piles with respect to the trench on the western side. Basically, the piles have ended up not being in the centre. I think this is mis-alignment by the pilers, as the groundworks contractor was quite meticulous when he did the marking out. Anyway, the conclusion was that it is not too serious. The misalignment is towards the building side of the centre line, which is where you would want it to be. Some minor re-positioning of the steelwork was requested, and the concrete pour for tomorrow was approved.

Just a pity that I won't be there to see it.

By the way, the piece of pipe through the centre trench is for a "Radon Sump", whatever that is !