This is another installment of the series on designing and building a house in the Philippines. An index to all of the posts in this series can be found here: House Build Philippines: Index. We also built a concrete hollow block perimeter fence. The index to all of the posts in that series can be found here: Perimeter Fence Philippines: Index
The walls continue to go up as some of the roof drainage system goes in. We even get a little electrical work done.
Drainage
Having lived in Seattle which is famous for being a very wet place, I thought I would be ready for rain in the tropics. Sure, it would be a lot warmer but falling water is the same everywhere, right? Nope! I have never seen it rain as hard anywhere – not even during thunderstorms during the hot, humid summers in New Jersey where I grew up – as it rains here. With a roof “footprint” of around 120 sq. meters, all of the water has to go somewhere. The answer is gutters at the roof edges, downspouts that empty into covered “wells” and buried pipes that carry the water from the wells to the channel that runs along our driveway and on off of the property. Below is what one of the wells look like. It’s just a concrete box with a hole in one side.
More Walls (And A Bit Of Electrical)
The exterior walls also continue to go up in this installment of our house building blog. At least, parts. Here you can see the uppermost reinforcement cage for a concrete “beam” that ties together all around the house like its sister at the bottom of the walls. This acts as both lintel for the windows and doors and what the steel roof beams will rest on and tie to.
Fill The House
The floor of the house is about four inches higher than the patios. This is standard practice here and a guard against minor flooding. To get us up that high, a couple of inches of fill was spread throughout the house’s interior and tamped down by hand with a couple of these log tampers. The rest of the floor height would come from the poured concrete and the tile flooring. Here our Jack Of Many Trades and friend Tata is slinging the log tamper. He’s hamming it up for the camera but it’s ridiculously hard work slamming that heavy hunk of tree into the ground over and over and over…
Interior Wall Trenches And Some Electrical Runs
As I said before during the building of our concrete wall, many things happen at once. It’s hard sometimes to present the story of building a house in a logical order. This is one of those times. The crew was building exterior walls, adding the concrete lintels, working on the exterior downspouts and drainage, and laying out and digging trenches for the interior walls at the same time. Added to all of that activity, the electrician finished the job he was working on and moved over to our job. Here you can see the orange pipe used for wire runs here.
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