We had quite a major set back with the construction about 8 weeks ago when I carried out some concrete tests on the foundations, the concrete was supposed to be 20 MPa concrete and the results came back at 11 MPa. For those that don't know what that means the concrete that the building contractors made was of really poor quality and only about half as strong as it should have been. We discovered that we had made a few minor mistakes when making the test cubes for the concrete test so spent a couple of weeks trying to find other ways to confirm the strength of the concrete only to find that no other useful tests are available in the country so we had to rely on the results we had. We then had a dilemma, do we knock the building down and start again at the risk of having the contractor walk out on us or do we compromise. I wasn't too keen on compromising too much as this region is well overdue for an earthquake, the Himalayas a few kilometers are a constant reminder of the fault line that passes through here. In the end we decided to change the roof design from a concrete slab design to a corrugated iron roof design, this reduced the load on the foundations by about 60% which meant that our weak foundations would still be strong enough to handle a pretty reasonable earthquake. We've also carried out tests on half a dozen different brands of cement available locally to determine which one we'll use for the rest of the building, this has been quite a learning experience for me having never really used the stuff before this project.
So finally a couple of weeks ago construction started again, we're now just about finished compacting the fill under the floor slab. It has been a slow process which hasn't been helped by the fact that the compacting machine the contractors are using is so old that it was also used by the Egyptians to build the pyramids and as a result breaks down at least three time a day. The original schedule would have seen us pouring the roof slab about now so we've lost quite a lot of time but thankfully we should be able to claw most of that back with the new roof design which will be much quicker to build.
