Days 28 to 31

Working on the second to the last level. The workers had to reconfigure the bamboo scaffolding to give them room to work on laying the tarp and wire mesh. They also had to saw off the remaining bamboo purlins which took time.

Tarp covering the top levels, the rains that poured that evening got through to the bond beam, causing a few leaks. It was the wrong placement of the tarp that caused it.

If you look closely up, you will find 4 inch pipe vents we have installed to help with ventilation inside the house.

Here is how the pipe vents look like from the inside.

View of the pipe vents from outside after the 1st layer of cement and wire mesh. We discovered slightly bigger cracks after the 1st layer of cement dried up. The sand we had ordered turned out to be finer than usual. As per the ferrocement expert, for finer sand the ratio of sand to cement should be 1:1, since our workers did not know this, they used the ratio we had for coarser sand, 1:2. We decided to just add another layer of cement to make sure it will be strong enough.

While the roof is getting its final cementing, we have begun prep work of our 12 posts. We need to reinforce these posts to since they take up all the weight of the cement roof. We will be adding 4 10mm rebars around, 2 layers 1/2 inch wire mesh. 

While work continues on the roof, we have been researching on the best waterproof product out here. There have been a few forums that discussed this and they recommend either the Thoroseal or Flexibond. Mostly, these were used to waterproof their ponds. We hope to figure this out soon so that we can make sure that our ferrocement roof will not leak. (It should not if the ferrocement mix was correct.)

Today we are back down in town, after doing our errands yesterday, our workers forgot to let us know we needed more of the waterproofer powder, Sahara. Well, that is part of being your own contractor and owner. Anyway, we needed more wire mesh for the posts. :)