23May06 Tuesday
Today we arrived on site after a really nice BBQ at Ken’s house Monday evening all ready to go to work. The local volunteers had put up the interior and exterior walls on Saturday. Keith was the boss of the work and we were divided up into work crews. Michael (1), Michael (2), Rob (1), Rob (2), Tisha and sometimes Michael (3) acted as crew chiefs. Tisha was put in charge of the ladies doing painting and finish work in the block house next door.
One of the things that had to be done was to put up and cross-brace T supports in preparation to put the ceiling panels on top of the walls. The T supports are placed so that they support the seams where the panels come together but are not supported by the walls. The ceiling panels are ¾ of an inch thick and when you walk on top of them they would break through without support from below.
The ceiling panels were delivered after lunch by a truck with a long reach boom crane that placed the panels on top of the walls. They are extremely heavy even though they are only about ¾ of an inch thick. The ceiling panels are approximately 8 by 14 feet and are moved into position by a couple of people on top guiding them and about 4 or 5 guys below with 4x2’s (that’s what they call them here) pushing up and providing the motive force to move them. This took most of the rest of the day.
It was good that there were two houses next to each other that we could work on. The other house kept the ladies busy almost all week. They really made a big contribution to the completion of that house. The second house was also of an interesting construction. It was basically on slab whereas the other house was of all wood and on stilts about 4 feet off the ground. The block house wasof post-stressed concrete construction. There were steel rods embedded in the concrete slab that were threaded on the top and then mortarless block are laid up to build the walls. The rods are coupled with longer rods to extend to above the top plate on top of the wall. After the walls are completed they are poured full of concrete and bolts are screwed on top of the rods and tightened to put the walls in compression hence the term post-stressed meaning after building stressing. A university student studying for his PhD did the design and a local construction company supplied a lot of the materials. It is thought that the design is earthquake proof.
Rain came late in the day and we had to tarp the top of the ceiling to prevent damage to the tri-board.
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