The structure, the mistakes, and moving in

With the groundworks done and a firm in place to build the skeleton, the first stage moved quickly. By the middle of July 2023 the ground floor and its uprights were up. By the end of the month the shuttering was erected ready to pour the first floor.

Concrete uprights standing on the ground-floor slab, several of them cylindrical, with reinforcing bar projecting from the tops and the block perimeter wall behind.

Then we changed the plans.

Half a metre

We had decided to modify the first-floor layout to add a third bedroom. It meant extra cost and it meant checking that the change had been built correctly before anything was set in concrete — and it was during that check that our building manager realised the ceiling was going to be about half a metre too low.

It is worth understanding how something that large hides in plain sight. At that stage the floor above you is a forest of shuttering forms and acrow props. The finished dimensions are not visible; you cannot stand in the room and see that the room is wrong. It was found because somebody was underneath it looking closely at something else.

The first-floor shuttering held up by a dense forest of acrow props, seen from outside the building.

Half a metre is not a detail. Caught a day later, it would have been permanent.

The fix was to reset at the correct height and top up the uprights at the same time as laying the ceiling. Between the correction and the changes for the new bedroom, the ground-floor ceiling — the base of the first floor — was not poured until the end of September 2023.

What the topping-up left behind

The uprights had originally been formed in tubes, as clean cylinders. The topping-up ruined them. They were left in a state where they could not be used as they were and had to be squared off retrospectively.

Some of the topped-up concrete had not been spread properly either, leaving bare rebar exposed where there should have been none. That had to be filled by hand.

The top of an upright after topping-up, showing voided concrete and exposed reinforcing bar, circled in green.

Our solution, much later, was to clad the uprights that remained visible in local white sandstone. It looks very good. It is not what we had expected to be doing, and it is not what we had budgeted for, but it is now a permanent feature of the house that exists because of a mistake.

A structural upright part-clad in local white sandstone, with the rough concrete still visible above.

Four months of nothing

From the end of September 2023 to the beginning of January 2024, nothing happened.

There is no more interesting version of this. We waited, not very patiently, for work to resume on a building that was standing there unfinished.

The roof pour

The roof — the ceiling of the first floor — was poured on 6 January 2024.

The same height mistake was made again. This time we caught it early, and the same fix applied: top up the uprights. On this occasion it did not matter much, because those uprights will be hidden inside the finished walls.

The larger problem was the cement. They ran out during the pour. Work stopped with parts of the roof unfinished and uncovered, including the top of the stairs, to be completed later rather than in one continuous pour.

The roof part-poured: finished concrete on the left, bare reinforcing mesh and blocks on the right where the cement ran out.

Once it had dried we tested it in the simplest way available: we poured water on the roof. It came straight through to the first floor.

The fall-out

They had also overcharged us for the cement on the final pour and agreed to refund the difference. They never did.

The contractor initially said they would put the leaks right. They did not. After that we could not get a response from them, and short of taking them to court there was no practical route left to us.

So we solved it ourselves. We applied coat after coat to the roof until the water stopped coming through. It is not the solution anyone would choose, but it worked, and it was the pragmatic answer to a problem we had been left holding.

This was not the same test the first firm had set us. There was no attempt to renegotiate, no demand for more money or more control. It was simpler than that, and in its way more discouraging: agreements that mattered, large and small, were not honoured — and eventually not even acknowledged.

We then found a new team of subcontractors, who carried out the remaining work at additional cost to us.

Watertight, and then habitable

With the structure up and the roof no longer leaking, the same subcontractors filled in the upstairs walls and applied the internal cement finish. Other contractors came in to paint and to install the electrics and plumbing.

The completed concrete frame with blockwork walls being filled in.

On 1 May 2024 we moved in.

The first floor became temporary living accommodation — essentially a one-bedroom apartment, and twice the size of the one we had sold in Santa Maria. It was a fantastic feeling. It also meant the rent we had been paying could go into the build instead, which changed the arithmetic of the whole project.

We were living on an active building site. We still are. It was, and remains, entirely worth it.