goILOILO.com
Travels and personal perspectives on Iloilo and Panay Island
Our Philippine house project: walls
Tags: Hollow Block Iloilo, Philippine Concrete, Philippine construction, Philippine welding, Rebar Philippines, Retire in the Philippines, steel Philippines
Building our house in the Philippines. January 31, 2010. We’ve just ended the first two weeks of construction. We’re generally pleased with the progress. We have thirteen workers on our crew including two foremen. I’m on-site most of the time so there are three “bosses”. So far we’ve spent about $8,000 including “soft costs” (architecture, permits), equipment, materials and labor. We’d like to keep our total cost to about P15,000 per square meter or about $50,000 for the 150 square meter house. Every day one faces decision which affect the cost. Should we use 6″ block for a stronger house — it only costs a P30,000 pesos more! Should the concrete floor be a bit thicker to reduce the chance of cracking? Should we use 1/4″ thick angle bar in building our roof trusses or the thinner and cheaper 5mm? Each of these decisions individually are not terribly significant, but taken together they can raise construction costs from an economical P12,000 per square meter to P20,000 or more. If you buy a house in a subdivision these decisions are so much easier. Every decision has been made to save money–for the developer!
- Feb. 4. Another load of steel arrives. This is $3,100.00 of steel; angle iron for building roof trusses and 10mm, 12mm and 16mm rebar.
Shopping for steel. It does seem very difficult to save money on basic materials such as cement and steel. While there are hundreds of construction supply firms, post-negotiation prices vary only by a few pesos. There are some pitfalls. Our specifications called for our roof trusses to be made of 2″ X 2″ X 1/4″ angle bar. Give this spec to construction material sellers and you’ll be excited by the price variations, hoping for a bargain. Look deeper and you’ll see that there is no 1/4″ thick angle bar available. After looking at angle bar from various sellers, I decided to buy a vernier caliper so that I could measure the thickness of various items. It turns out that the prices varied because their response for a price on 2×2x1/4 included material not even remotely meeting the specification; 4mm, 5mm, 5.5mm and 6mm angle bar. One-fourth inch equals 6.35mm. The caliper is also useful for detecting undersized rebar. Not surprisingly, it turns out that, once again, price differences are minor once you’ve finally managed compare products with similar specs.
There’s another complication. It turns out that steel is sold by kilograms per meter. This may be a fair way to price steel products but a difficult translation when your engineering specs call for 2″x2″x1/4″!
Welding. The angle iron in this load will be used to make roof trusses. They will be constructed on-site by our crew, two of whom are experienced welders. Setting up our own welding shop makes economic sense. The 300 amp welder and AEG cut-off saw cost about P25,000 or about $500. Our welders are paid P280 per day. Our equipment will be paid for in savings on the trusses. We are also considering constructing our own steel casement windows.
- Digging wall footers – room shapes start to show. The top of the block in the foreground is just about finished floor level — about one meter above the surrounding rice land.
My ambition to have top quality concrete quality concrete in our house project has sometimes led to frustration. My crew are hard workers, but accustomed to their ways of concrete work. The local gravel contains so much sand that the mix probably ends up being 1-3-2 (one cement, three sand and two gravel). The workers like this sandy gravel because it’s easy to work with, flows easily into forms. I pushed to use the washed 3/4′ gravel as the only aggregate, but I learned that the 3/4″ gravel in fact has larger stone which can lodge in the rebar cages. Our most recent solution is to screen the supposed 3/4″ gravel with a 1″ screen. About half of the material passes through the screen. The smaller material should work better in the columns and beams.
Trying to keep workers from adding too much water to concrete is a legendary Philippine construction problem. They like to make soupy concrete because it flows easily and does not set-up quickly, it remains “workable” for a much longer time than proper concrete. It flows easily into forms. Once the soupy concrete sets, it looks fine but really is weakened. When I mange to get proper concrete made, the crew is horrified at at how quickly it sets. It disrupts the way they are used to working. I had read that some on-site supervising engineers have been so frustrated with this problem that they just disappeared from the project site. I now understand their problem. Another problem is keeping workers from “tempering” (adding water and remixing) the already mixed concrete or mortar. This is a definite NO on our project. My insisting that concrete be mixed my way is resented by some crew members who have been working with concrete all their working lives.
The above photo is from the end of week three. About $12,500 has been spent, but a good part of this is in materials stored on site but not yet used, including cement, block, and the load of steel shown above.
With some help from El Nino we have had perfect construction weather. We have not had any rain since October. This has been terrible for farmers but good for us. One continuing worry about the dry weather is that our well will run dry. We use so much water for making concrete, cleaning tools and equipment, watering plants, and for our crew’s personal needs — washing, laundry and so forth. So far the well has held up. We had it redug deeper last year. See http://goiloilo.com/digging-water-well-tigbauan-philippines/ From this point it should be about a month until we have our walls up and roof on. After that, rain is not such a problem.
Walls, Feb. 13, 2010 (24 work days)
Wetting hollow block
Once you receive delivery of your hollow block, you must constantly keep them wet. If they dry out they lose strength and eventually crumble back into the sand they were made from. 2-16-10. Day 26 of project.
Lintel Beam 2-19-10
Overview 2-19-10
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Posted by GOIloilo on 02.04.10 9:04PM under Our House Project, Philippine Retirement
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Posted by Our house project: getting started at last at goILOILO.com on 02.10.10 8:30 pm
[...] Next chapter: Our House Project – Week Three http://goiloilo.com/our-house-project-week-three/ [...]
Posted by gad s on 02.25.10 11:13 am
Hi Bob – Thanks a lot showing important photos of your sturdy house in process and giving details on civil construction, materials costs, labor costs, materials quality, pitfalls to avoid, and many others. This gives me more confidence to supervise whatever future expansion our small church, Ebenezer CRC, will undertake at Bacolod City, Negros Occ. i thank God for you and Carol. gad