Blenheim Grove video 4 – Concrete & Bricks

Important decisions are being made every day on site at Blenheim Grove… and today, we’re looking at brick samples! It took us a long time to choose the bricks for colour, size, shape… We’re ordering 50,000 of them, so we don’t want to click ‘buy’ willy nilly! See which one you would have picked.

Check back often as we will be posting videos of our progress throughout the build.

Video transcript:

My name is Gus, I’m here as the founder of Unboxed Homes. So I thought I’d do a little selfie video, see if that works out. I thought I’d do a little few point things out, some interesting bits. Maybe give you a sense of how a building goes together if you don’t know. Or if you do you can write and tell us what we’re doing wrong.

Behind me you can see the train going past.

This is the form work for the concrete retaining wall, so if you look just down there, that is the rebar. That’s what holds the concrete up.
We’ve got the slab in, see? That’s the concrete slab.
Some of the drain points down there. They’re doing some digging up there, can you see behind me?
We’ve got the rest of the form work going in, and then hopefully we’ll be ready to pour the next bit of concrete, which just basically goes in this hole, along there.
And then we’re currently in about the lower basement. If you look there you can see the bottom of the hoarding there is about the pavement level.
They’re doing some sawing over there, and right in the back you can see a good action pic, let’s see if you can… so the piles and things that go underneath the slab holds all this up together.
This is where all the rebar comes out, ready for the next bit of concrete.
And over there you can see all the piles. Those are the piles that basically get cut down and then the concrete goes on top and then it starts to look like that.
This thing here, it looks like a bit of my grandmother’s old carpet but in fact it’s a thing called Volclay which actually keeps the water out. Looks like that on the outside, and you cover that around, and then when the concrete goes against it, keeps it in place, and supposedly that’s waterproof.
So now we’re going to have a look at the sample panel. This is a very exciting moment, is when we decide what bricks to go for. Now this has been a very very difficult decision. It’s been months of trying to decide what brick to go for, we had one but then apparently the bricklayers didn’t like it because it comes from Denmark, and Denmark don’t produce something called frogs, which is a kind of thing on the top of a brick.
That also doesn’t have frogs but for some reason they’re happy with those. Anyway, so we found these other bricks, over here.
So we’ve got choice 1, and choice 2. I thnk we’re all leaning towards choice 1. And it’s an important decision, we’re thinking about maybe a pale mortar. If you look at those you can see these have been raked out, ready for us to put some mortar in. And that’s a big choice because you think we’re ordering 50,000 of these things, and they’re quite expensive. So we do not want to be getting it wrong.
That’s about it for now, hope you enjoyed the little snippet. If you did, I will do some more. Thanks a lot, see you soon.