Any builders on here? need a little advice.

[Iamzod]

We're currently in the middle of getting the concrete base down for a double garage behind our house and are currently a little unsure on how to go about putting the rebar down in the concrete.

Was wondering if holding it in place by resting it on bricks is a bad idea, will it leave the concrete weak as the bricks will be concreted over?

The damp proof aint down yet as we want to be sure what were doing first, but i have taken a few pics to show roughly what i'm talking about. We'd be concreting the bricks & rebar in place first then leaving it a few days before covering the whole lot & smooting it off.

We'd be covering the entire area with it also.

Just rough pics as i suck at describing stuff like this.

 

[Iamzod]

Err, your shuttering looks decidedly suspect

Shuttering aint done yet, just has copper pipe holding it in place

Should also have not dug down for the foundations......

Not quite sure what you mean there, we shouldn't have dug down?

 

[Iamzod]

Lay concrete down to desired rebar depth, lay rebar on top and spread remaining concrete on top? That seems like the easiest way to do it. As long as you don't leave more than a couple of minutes between each layering of concrete I see no problem.

The concrete is going down in 9 sections though & doing it this way would mean laying it down over the whole base area first or not having any overlap in the rebar between sections.

We wouldnt be able to get it down quick enough either as a full size cement mixer can only get as close as about 105 feet of the area.

 

[Iamzod]

sorry i meant - it looks like all of the foundation material has jus been layed directly onto the top soil, you should have dug down..............does that make more sense

Aye, lol

We have dug down, right at the back in one corner we went down by over a meter to get it level, we removed over 17 Tons of soil & clay from the area, the foundation material is now sat on clay.

It's about 6" deep at the front and the concrete is being poured to the depth of the top of the shuttering.

Anyway, the engineer that came out from the council to look at it before the crush went down was happy with it.

 

[Iamzod]

its hard to comment on anything here ....if your doing a raft base which i presume you are doing lay some mesh on the floor where you want it, lay some concrete on top another layer of mesh and then more concrete then just give a light tamp off....the bricks would be fine but theres no need for them


main thing is to just make sure you have a lot of mesh in

Yeah, it's a raft base, we dug down still though.

Heres a pic from just after we re-started on it a couple of months back after the winter, before we had finished sorting the ground out.

 

[Iamzod]

You're constructing a base for a double garage by yourself? Do you have any experience on how to lay bases? No offence but it looks like an amateur job. Have you got any experience in how to lay concrete/level it? If it was just for a shed or something then i'd say you could do it yourself, but a large scale base like that is hard to level if you don't know the correct techniques.

Not myself no, but my dad has i'm just helping him & paying half the costs as my car is going in there so i can do an engine build & swap over the winter.

He aint done anything quite this large admittedly but it aint going down all at once, it's being done in 9 bays as there'd be no way to get so much concrete down all in one go as theres no way to get to it with a large cement mixer.

 

[Iamzod]

ohh P.S cut the mesh for around the edges...instead of laying the big sheets like that cut strips of mesh to fit round the edges as the edges are you main priority...(which takes you back to the bricks....you wouldnt need them when you cut the mesh in strips

Think he is planning on cutting strips and having like a second layer around the edges about 3-4 inches lower than the top layer.

So there would be like a brick stood vertically, with a strip of rebar concreted to it, then another brick horizontally on its side with the top layer of rebar concreted to that.

The damp proof membrane is going straight down on the crush and up the sides and out over the top of the shuttering, as it's all below ground apart from the front and half of one side.

Then the garden in front of the garage will be concreted partially too with a y shaped driveway running up to it.

We wanted a flat driveway in front of it, and the council wont let us dig that deep further down the garden as theres a main drain running under the front part of the garden, so it has to be built up.