18 September 2008

Building Apollo Studio (Part 11)

On Monday we had another setback unfortunately. Another collapse of the side of the hole. This time at our neighbors. A part of their garden collapsed into ours and the fence in between came down. Here you see the constructor cleaning the mess up. They put ropes on the fence to keep it up again. It took them almost all day to repair this again so another day. Our neighbor was not very happy of course but was at first was concerned that this would not go any further. The guys that were going to build the walls came at 7 that day and left again because of this. We slept very bad the following night hoping that we could finally continue. I will be very happy when they can start filling up this ever growing hole again.

On Tuesday morning we were happy to see that nothing else collapsed that night. At 6:45 the constructor arrived and they started constructing the temporary double walls that will hold the concrete for the final walls. It was quite nice to see that they have a complete fitting system for this. We expected them to use wood or something like that, but that wasn't the case. They use big panels that are apparently reusable. But still a lot of work. It took them all day to build this construction. Quite impressive to watch this.

In the pictures on the left you see the final construction. On top you see wooden planks that makes a path they can walk on. Very clever. You can also see the double wall now. In the space in between the concrete will go. You can also see that they put poles to the walls in the middle to hold the walls up. The weight of the concrete is a lot and it is nice when the walls end up straight of course :) These poles are fastened to the foundation so the whole thing can't go anywhere. They left it like this on Tuesday because it was already quite late.

On Wednesday they returned to put in the concrete. They used a big crane to hoist up small portions they could put in between the double wall. They went round the project a couple of times filling everything up smoothly and equally. This whole process took about half a day to complete. Now this has to harden again for another few days and the planning is that on Monday they come back to remove the temporary double walls and they we should have nice concrete walls for the basement :) I'm very curious how that will look. The step after that will be construction a roof on top of this all. I'll update you next week on the progress. For now we are a bit less worried and hopefully we can sleep a bit better. I just hope not more of the neighbors garden will slide down again. We can only hope for the best on this and repair whatever damage is done afterward.

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