Movin’ On Up!
Last week, construction leapt forward with the erection of our second story floor. Workers began hoisting steel columns, laying concrete beams and raising concrete roof block.
Suddenly, walls and roofs were rising from the ground and new rooms, like the outdoor living room, were taking shape.
The main mass in this new floor is a type of concrete block (pictured below) designed to drop in between concrete beams to form a roof - an efficient method that was laid in a snap.
Where the floor is exposed to the sun, we opted to replace the concrete block with one made from polystyrene (gleaming in white below).
Polystyrene gives us an effective insulating barrier that will prevent heat penetrating the room below. This lighter structure is also good as it significantly reduces the weight of the roof and allows for thinner support columns beneath, but we digress…
A week of work and all this new construction was ready to be encased in a thin layer of concrete that would form the second story floor.
On the appointed day, a concrete mixer was rented for the grand pouring event (actually the next day because the first concrete mixer rented was broken). A steady stream of workers spent the day feeding the mixer with cement, gravel and water.
Another stream of workers then carried buckets of wet concrete into the site so they could be hoisted, by hand, onto the slab for pouring. It was lucky the day was cool, as we may have broken a sweat watching all that heavy lifting.
With work complete, our crew celebrated with well earned chamorro and beer. Our reward was to stand atop our castle and contemplate the new formed space. It was an exciting day.
