Ground Floor Walls

Day 132
September 1, 2012

Walls come up !

Overall house perspective

Living Room

Ground floor Bedroom

Patio

Best way to describe progress is to show some visuals.  So, here they are..

A number of our rooms have exposed bricks. Seeing them in real is very different than seeing them in architecture elevation. One obvious piece of advice on deciding on elevation materials is therefore to look at more houses than blueprints. Even seeing pictures like this is not a replacement for actual visits to the house. Actual visit gives a real sense of the space - How does the space gel with rest of the surroundings, Likes and dislikes about material texture and finer details, and so on.

We had seen these "Balyapatnam" bricks at a few houses and while bricks themselves were not that much of a surprise it indeed is exciting to visualize how bricks add character to various spaces.

As mentioned earlier, once markings are done and inspection has validated them, protruding walls is a pretty straight-forward task. This video shows workers as they were building these walls.


A few things to keep in mind

• Your contractor should have planned detailed supplies and pre-ordered them. These are things like sticks, bricks, aggregate, water, etc. Make sure these don't add to delays. 
• Laying expose bricks requires skills. Also, it usually takes longer to lay these than the normal bricks. More masons that can lay them in parallel, faster progress it'd make. 

Exposed brick walls have to be planned upfront to avoid re-work later on. Specifically,

• Niches - Position, height and width of each niche that would be placed in the wall. 
• Electrical layout - If any ducts have to pass through this wall these need to be planned and performed while these walls come up. (Note: From aesthetics perspective, it is advisable to not have any electrical points in the brick wall itself.)
• Brick patterns - To avoid monotonous look, border brick patterns can be added on a wall. Typically, these are added a few rows above the lintel. These have to be decided and upfront planned with mason. Some times, masons may not know how to lay patterns (especially if they tend to be difficult) and it is wise to allow time for these. There are a number of patterns available on the net.. Some tend to be dominating while others tend to be too big and are better suited for bigger buildings than houses. Do a bit of research to identify ones that best suit dimension and style of your room. 

It is important that adjacent walls come-up together. This provides uniformity to spaces as well as allows workers to connect edges as they come up.

Lintel beam

To refresh, lintel beam serves the purpose of binding various spaces in the house together as well as providing foundation to host brick layers extending to roof. Lintel beam is placed typically on top of window and door spaces.

This video talks about process of constructing lintel beam. Process is very similar to laying any slab. Put re-inforcement in the form of wooden sticks. Then, lay wooden sheets on top of window or door space. Do the form work (i.e. lay-down the steel rods that provides the core of the beam). Provide shape by reinforcing wooden planks on both sides. Pour the concrete and allow it to dry for a few days. Remove the wooden planks on the side as well as wooden sticks. That's pretty much it.

While it does sound simple, this process does take time and a lot of this progress is not visible (unlike when walls come up). Our philosophy for construction  has been to ensure daily progress but not judge the quantum of progress. We believe this works better to ensure quality.

Stairs

Last piece in this segment is the stairs. As mentioned above, all parts of the house needs to come up together. Stairs in the house have to blend with the connecting walls and hence it is about time to start working on them.

This video covers baseline work for stairs. It is similar in concept to laying down a beam. It is a bit more work because before laying the concrete they need to provide exact shape of stairs through wooden planks.

While planning stairs, ensure that each step is not more than 7" tall. Also, typical depth of each step is about 11-12". These are little things that are important to get right (You don't want people to think where to put their step while climbing stairs :-)).

Once lintel beam is done, workers continue process of laying further bricks that extend walls to roof. Next post will talk about laying ground floor roof. 

Ground Floor Plan

Day 98
July 28, 2012

Foundation wrap-up: 
It is almost 100 days and foundation work is complete. We are on to ground floor now. Before we get started on ground floor there are a couple of things to finish on foundation

1. Foundation inspection - If architect has not inspected foundation level be sure to schedule and ensure it gets done now. Purpose of inspection is to:
• Ensure height of foundation is in accordance to the drawing
• Ensure house does not have unintended height differences across various spaces
• Build an opinion on the quality of construction
• Ensure setbacks are appropriately marked.
2. Receipt verification - Before ground floor construction starts, it is a good idea to assess planned vs actual cost to construct foundation. Contractors typically provide a Bill of Quantity (BOQ) that lays out estimated material required for each work item and corresponding cost. This is the time to verify overage or underage of quantities and actual cost. A good way to cross-check this is to have your contractor provide receipts of materials used and have your architect measure the quantity of material used in the house. Depending on individual arrangements, a % of estimated payment can be released earlier but final settlement for foundation level should only be done after receipt verification.

This is also the time to apply for the "Commencement certificate" (CC) that municipality often recommends. CC, as I understand, is often a requirement to procure "Occupation certificate" (OC) when your house completes and before it can be occupied. For Bangalore anyway, CC *seems* an optional thing for residential construction. Although I was planning to procure CC, I dropped that plan based on architect and contractor's advice. 

Ok, let's get on with the ground floor plan. 

Working drawings:

Here is complete set of drawings architect will provide to you and the contractor to construct ground floor. The actual number of drawings may vary depending on complexity of the house. Here is the types of drawings you should expect

• Wall schedule - Shows what kind of wall, such as plastered, exposed brick, or claddings
• Detailed working drawing - Shows detailed width of each edge within room, height and positioning of windows and doors, and position and dimensions of niches within walls
• Chejja details - For houses that have sloping roof, this one shows position, width and slope of the chejjas. 
• Lintel details - Shows internal structure of the lintel beam, width, height, and measurements on top of each window and doors. 
• Electrical layout - Shows detailed marking of electrical points and switches. This one requires thinking through lifestyle habits and therefore may require a few iterations to settle. 
• Roof slab marking - Shows the height of roof slab, construction markings for laying the beams, and materials to be used for making roof slab. 

Ground floor plan:

Ravi explains process of constructing ground floor. Basically, there are 4 stages: 

1. Lay-down bricks till lintel level

2. Construct lintel beam

3. Lay-down bricks till roof level

4. Lay-down roof

The two new terms I learnt were sill and lintel. For those not from civil engineering background, sill essentially is the bottom-edge of the window and lintel is the top-edge of the window. 

Constructing walls is typically easy as it amounts to laying down bricks (or blocks if you were using cement blocks). The only complexity arises as a result of windows and doors. Hence, contractors first need to clearly mark position for each window and door including their sill and lintel positions. For doors, sill is 0 and typical lintel level is at 7'. For window obviously these vary depending on individual requirements. 

Make sure these markings are clearly visible and do not get washed away. 

Upon completing markings usually next step is to lay down first-course brickwork. What this means is laying down first-layer of brick on plinth across the house. The video below shows first-layer brickwork laid out in the house. When first-course brickwork is completed it is critical to schedule "first course brickwork" inspection. This allows architect to validate width of each wall within house to ensure it is according to the spec. This is the last stage before wall start to build-up and so important to double-check as mistake here can be expensive. 

Wire-cut bricks

In our house we have identified a few areas to have exposed bricks. These are special bricks in a few ways

• They cost more - about 4-5 times more than the average bricks
• They require special skills to lay them down 
• Since these bricks are always exposed (unlike standard bricks which gets plastered upon) these bricks should be handled with extreme care and should not get chipped while laying down. 
• Any electrical points on walls that have wire-cut bricks have to be established and planned for upfront. 
• Any niches within the walls that have wire-cut bricks have to be planned upfront. 

This video shows a glimpse of character wire-cut bricks add. I wasn't a big believer in them initially but seeing them in real has certainly turned me over :-)

Once architect inspects first course brickwork, workers simply repeat the pattern of first-course brickwork by laying further courses of brickwork. Of course they have to keep in mind door and window positions and respective sill levels. However, it is more or less a mundane task and walls actually come-up quite fast. 

This also actually first real exciting stage as spaces come alive and as you walk around the house you start to develop the feel of the house. House is no more an abstract concept or a mere plan on the paper. It is real and alive ! We did notice increased drive within ourselves to go and visit the site everyday to observe every little progress and be a part of action. Following blog posts will share some of the pictures from ground floor construction.