Limping Along

22nd December, 2011 - steel bars for concrete columns of 1st floor up and ready

Just when I thought things were smoothly moving along, the holiday season descended upon us. Holidays are socially accepted and morally sanctioned times to overindulge, whether at play or at rest. A joy most of the time. But too much of a good thing is precisely that - too much. The 5 holidays over the past month and a half meant in this case, a loss of the ability to work normally. And so, since the 2011 Christmas holidays, work has been limping along, slowly and painfully. This is going to be a tough race to win.

28th December, 2011 - 1st floor columns casting complete

1st January, 2012 - Ground floor form-work supports removed, beginning form-work for 2nd floor beams and slab

4th January, 2012 - ready for casting

9th January, 2012 - 2nd floor slab completed

16th January, 2012 - 2nd floor columns ready for casting

19th January, 2012 - beginning form-work for flat roof

Hoping It Was Priscilla

20th December, 2011

sitting pretty in pink

Lip-synching stiletto-ed dancing-queens were - disappointingly - not what I encountered behind the flaming pink monster truck parked INSIDE my house on this particular site visit. Instead, was something a little more elegant albeit more austere: It was a jaw-droppingly gargantuan CRANE!

The pink cement truck and a crane parked behind. There was just about enough space for me to stand and pivot around.

Ewe Hong the contractor, was ecstatic that he managed to squeeze (barely!!) these 2 pieces of growling mega-machinery into the site. Because he could do this, the floor slabs of the 1st & 2nd floors and the roof-garden could now be poured more easily and quickly using the machines. But, this was only to be done for the back 1/3 of the building (until grid-line#6 on the plan).

Building of the middle section would continue laboriously without the help of heavy machinery after the roof of the back section is completed.

Grunting efficiently away, the pink cement truck spews its unctuous contents into the awaiting crucible

The crucible - filled with grade 35 concrete - is then precariously lifted over the roof-tops ...

... to elegantly arrive at its destination, where its precious cargo ultimately becomes an indiscernible part of a floor slab!

Inching Up

A couple of things I have learnt about what happens to a construction project at the end of the year is that 1) the monsoon rains limit the number of working hours if the work to be done is outdoors, and 2) sub-contractors are rushing to complete projects before year-end so they can collect payment and your project - because it only started not too long ago, or simply because you are just a small-fry - is left suspended. These 2 factors alone are enough to slow everything down to the point of a stand-still on some days.

The best time to get things done is during the 7th lunar month, it seems. Its when construction workers are the least busy because many Chinese are pantang and don't want to have projects during that period. Useful piece of info, especially if living in Penang. Knowledge is power.

Here is a pictorial update on the slow progress so far.

4th November: the 9th pile-cap completed and I'm off to KL

10th November: the remaining pile-caps in place, ground beams laid and the tractor clearing the site

24th November: The plumber has put this project on hold while he completes another project. But the sewage and drainage pipes have to be laid before the ground slab is poured. So work on the ground slab is suspended until the plumber returns. Meanwhile, the pillars at the back of the house has been erected.

1st December: Formwork for beams & slab of back portion of 1st floor being made.

2nd December: Making the cage for the concrete slab

Capping the 9th Pile - Monsoon Excitement!

unloading the pre-mixed concrete on to wheel-barrows

2nd November, 2011: The concrete delivery truck never arrives on time. The monsoon rains on the other hand, almost always do. So when the truck finally arrived at 4.15pm last Wednesday, the workers exploded into a frenzy, releasing the humid afternoon's accumulated anxieties and tensions as they raced against time to fill the pile-cap with wheel-barrow after wheel-barrow of concrete.

The pile was capped in 30 minutes, just in time before the first drops were felt. Hurrah!!

Quickly! Quickly! Racing to cap the piles before the rains arrived

Storm clouds gathering. Arrive it did. As expected.

Lightweight Bricks

An Autoclaved Aerated Conrete block or lightweight brick, is essentially concrete with lots of little air pockets. According to Wikipedia, AAC was invented in the mid-1920s by the Swedish architect and inventor Johan Axel Eriksson. But it only became a popular building material world-wide in the 1980's. To me, it looks like a rectangular block of hardened meringue.

The wall - notice the size of the normal brick sitting on top of the wall

The wall separating the house and the back-lane is being rebuilt using this material. The reason for using this "brick" over conventional clay bricks is the need to lighten the load on the site. Indeed, these blocks are light - scarily light. The wall swayed when I touched it while it was being built, but thankfully stiffened when the concrete columns were erected later, effectively bracing the ends of the wall.

AAC blocks will also be used for all the walls dividing the rooms. Because they have so much air in them, they are very effective thermal and sound insulators, perfect for hotel room walls.

Ground Beams

Laying of ground-beams are underway. As of today, the ground-beams for the kitchen/toilet area at the back of the house have been laid.

ground-beams for the toilets & kitchen area

Ground-beams function as connectors between pile-caps. (and pile-caps are concrete blocks that sit on top of the piles) In a site where the ground is soft, there is a high risk of uneven settlement amongst the pile-caps. So, what the ground-beams do is that they "tie" the caps together to stabilize the foundation and minimize uneven settling. The workers are currently laying the beams in the studio/gallery section.

moulding for the ground-beam in the studio area, waiting to be filled with concrete

Look at how high the water-table level is - sitting just below the pile-caps. After a recent bout of monsoon rains, the water level rose up to about a foot and a half below floor level. You can gauge the water level from the ground-beam at the back section. It looked like this:-

after the rain

Bakau Rules the Day

the architect's vision

Originally, the 3-storey extension at the back of the house was to sit on a foundation of concrete piles. But we switched to using bakau piles after discovering there was only one piling contractor in all of Malaysia with equipment compact enough to enter the site. He was going to charge me over 3x the normal mobilisation cost, probably because he had a monopoly on the market. I wasn't about to spend the amount he wanted, which was almost a quarter of my budget. So, bakau piles it had to be.

bakau standing by

It turns out that bakau wood is an extremely suitable piling material for the soil conditions at Malay Street, and has been traditionally used in the area as a material for laying building foundations. As the area was reclaimed from what was originally a swamp, the water table is very high. This allowed the piles to be perpetually immersed in water - a pre-requisite condition for ensuring bakau - or mangrove - doesn't rot. Also, the 'soil', being composed of marine clay made it easy to drive the piles in using only a backhoe.

the backhoe, ready to go

I learned that bakau piles are called "friction piles" because the piles are suspended in the clay by friction between the pile and the surrounding clay - rather than resting on rock or a hard surface at the bottom. Its as if the clay were gripping the piles like a hand would.

bakau piles for one column, ready for capping

This would work out well. Except that the weight of the building had to be reduced. So, we scrapped the green roof and changed the concrete stairs at the back to one of steel.

pouring concrete to cap the pile