It’s Monday morning and the Bilba Boys from Coin (Malaga) are back in town! This time they will build a roof over our heads. And again, they’ll do it within … a week !
We just went to the building site and they are busy setting up the scaffolding. All the insulation and steel is already on site. The sun here in southern Spain is quite strong. Therefore our architects have ordered some extra thick insulation for the roof in order to keep our heads cool. There are not many days it rains here either but when it does, it really buckets down. So on top of the roof that they will build this week, our main contractor (Desain) will create another layer. They will also guide the rain water to the hidden drainpipes. However that will have to wait a few weeks, first things first.
Building our roof over our heads
We are using the LT module from Sismo Spain. The bottom component is an EPS (expanded polystyrene) baseplate of 4 cm on which we added another 4 cm. On top of that they add EPS blocks of 25 to the base plate. And again on top of that and in between the EPS blocks they reinforce it with steel. All this so that on Thursday afternoon they can pour the concrete on top and in-between the blocks.
In layman terms; a bit of foam, then some more foam and a bit of reinforced concrete. Basically this helps us to have a roof with excellent acoustic and thermal insulation. Our walls are also well insulated. A sandwich of 8 cm of Neopor, 11 cm of concrete and again 4 cm of Neopor on the inside. In other words the makings of an energy efficient home.
This week in a minute
music by Crowander
So, last week, in 4 days Bilba built the walls and in another 4 they built the roof, not bad is it. Well technically it’s 5 days for the roof. Rain was expected Thursday afternoon so they postponed the pouring of the concrete to Friday morning. Although, … it didn’t rain of course.
Quality Control
I really enjoy the feeling of these past two Thursdays. Our architect (David) and our technical architect (Encarna) double check that all items are in order. They do this together with the technical architect from the structural contractor Bilba (Javier) as well as their onsite construction manager (Nacho). Next to this we also had the technical architect (José Antonio) from our main constructor Desain ensuring that all is allright for the handover to them. When you see them point and write things down … you think … are we or are we not all OK to go ? It’s a really good feeling when so many qualified experts say … yes all lights are on green!
Now we just have to wait for the concrete to be completely dry and the results of the “concrete inspector” to give his official approval after 28 days. In the meantime, our main contractor DESAIN, will be doing some work outside the house.
