Having been around concrete all my life I am naturally interested in exploring using it any way that I can and with any chance I have. My wife is less excited with this prospect but keeps an open mind. At one point in the design of the house we had talked about incorporating rammed earth as a material that would be expressed as a theme for the interior and exterior of the house. When it got down to it though, it was too expensive and too complicated to use. And so the idea of using exposed concrete became the natural second option.
The one main wall where this is to occur is the end wall of the living room (on the North side). It’s probably the most focal point of the house and will be seen by anyone who comes to visit. The pressure was on. I wanted to capture the same sort of feel as a rammed earth wall which tends to look striated from the various levels of earth that are compacted in layer after layer to make up the height of the wall. So I decided to go to an older method of forming the wall known as board form.
Rather than building the wall forms out of large sheets of smooth plywood, you form using long planks of wood that are rough sawn. I also decided to play with the colour of the concrete and add an admixture. For all you concrete geeks out there the concrete mix was as follows:
30 mpa with 3/8” aggregate and ½ of 1% Glenium 3030NS.
For the colour admixture we used 1 bag BL-3212R Silver Diamond from Interstar for every cubic meter.
So this Friday with big snowflakes falling out of the sky the concrete arrived.
Hello this is Austin I got your email and think this is great but if you want you can send emails to my email austindistefano@hotmail.com not my school one because i get it on my phone and my computer. Hope you guys are having fun.
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Just a hint you might want to move the writing at the bottom of the page because it is hard to read over the picture
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