Hooray, at last

At around about 8.30 am this morning I thought that I heard a ‘mechanical’ sound coming from the top of my land and sure enough, to my pleasant surprise there was a smart blue delivery truck with its driver just about to start unloading materials that will be needed in the next phase of my house-build project.

The truck was heavily loaded with terra-cotta building blocks, which are used in most of the constructions down here, and first off was a small pallet of small blocks with holes in them that when stacked up will form some kind of flue. As my new house won’t have a flue I’ll be interested to see what they will be used for – some sort of conduit for electrical cables perhaps?

Over the next hour or so all of the blocks were unloaded using a very powerful Hiab hoist with an amazingly long arm that was fitted on the tail of the truck. To give an idea of what I’m talking about, each pallet weighed 1000 kgs (I think) and the hoist arm was extended to great lengths, as shown in some of the following images, until the full weight of the blocks was distributed over the complete floor area of the house and the blocks themselves will be conveniently placed for when the mason(s) come to set them in place to build the walls.

With its delivery completed, the truck departed after just over an hour leaving the blocks ready for use. I guess that the next delivery will be of the special sealant that will be used to join them together to construct the walls.

So what great news this was! A delivery of material that is really meaningful in terms of the build as a whole – you can’t get more meaningful than the stuff that the walls will be made out of. And hopefully this signals that the project is ready for a big leap forward, because once the builders start on the blockwork they don’t normally stop until the walls are all up. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that that will be so in my build 😉