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.