We're concreting at a crazy pace! The slab is coming into the passes

With the completion of the foundation passes, we had to work on the reinforced concrete foundation slab. The slab structure was designed to a thickness of 100 mm with the concreting of bonded reinforcement made of 6 mm diameter bars.

During the first concreting we encountered a problem where the tied kari net had curled and we could not pour the reinforcement in this form. The cause of this problem was twofold: firstly, the reinforcement was not tied in every square of the net and we did not have enough spacers, although we tried to move the structure carefully, the net had to be redone in the end. We tied the rebar in more places and put more spacers on the net. This solution has already been successful.

There was about a day and a half of preparation before the actual concreting, when we smothered the substrate and put down the separation foil. We laid the sewer lines in the bathroom rooms of the house and it was time to pour the foundation slab.

As the concrete strip is 4 metres wide and our pulling bar is only 3 metres wide, we used the following solution: We concreted the first lane in the middle, which divided the width for concreting into two halves, so that we could work with the 3-meter-long pulling bar without any problems.

After the actual pouring, we treated the slab with water and covered it with a tarp to prevent the concrete from cracking. The whole concreting process was eventually divided into four parts and on average we managed to make 30 m², or 3 cubes of concrete, in a day. On average, this work took us 4 hours a day, and it was done by both us from the Czech team and a bunch of Zambian volunteers.

Next we have to build the vertical structures. So don't miss it!