Re-do The Slab

As you can see this is a rather "odd" situation. The frame, newly completed, has been jacked up in preparation for the cutting out of the new slab. Yes, You read correctly. The "new" slab. The new bit is a 1.5 m extension to the west and a 1m extension to the east, adding an extra 12m2 to the house size. It seems that when the slab extension was poured it was faulty. The whole sordid tale goes something like this.

On Melbourne Cup Day (2 November 2005) a load of concrete was due to be delivered to the building site. According to my recollection the truck arrived late, got bogged and could not reach the building site before the concrete started to cure.

Rather than cancelling the load and writing-off the job, the concreter accepted the load and started to wheelbarrow the load in from the closest point to which the truck could get. When he realised that the concreter was curing faster than he could unload it, he called the Project Manager who pitched in and heroically helped barrow concrete into the formwork for the slab.

Unfortunately is was curing quicker than it could be poured and the slab extensions cured before they could be worked clear of air pockets and smoothed over. Fortunately, Meryl happened to be in the neighbourhood and inspected the work. It was so bad that it was obvious to a novice that it would not meet specification. I referred the matter to our independant certifier, who ordered work on the site halted and concrete samples taken for testing. The samples failed, not reaching the required 20mPa. Even after 1 month of curing, the samples reached only 14mPa!

We asked that the builder fixed the problem promptly , but the concrete supplier insisted on waiting a full month before they would reinstate the works. Eventually they came to the party so this photo, taken in December, shows.