Morning all,
Progress continues to frustrate, though we did get some of our strip foundations poured yesterday. Around 10m3 by the time we’d finished.
Today we did another 5m3 finishing off our piers along the North wall.
We’ve got a few more people on site from the main contractor but not nearly as many as we had asked for so this morning I made arrangements for us to employ our own tradesmen who bring their own tools and materials. We’ll see how these guys work out but I’ve told them if they’re good, we’ll probably keep them on board for a while.
I’ve told the contractor the cost of all this would be deducted from his payment as my patience with them has now almost evaporated.
We continue building cages, laying drains (the 5th line went in today), extending the wall and making shutters and boxing.
We had our weekly tool box meeting this morning and discussed, among other things, the importance of being on time. This was especially ironic given that the main contractors foreman and one of their supervisors were locked out of the site as they didn’t arrive on time. They later had the nerve to complain that I’d started the meeting without them.
You can imagine how this was received...
I’ve also told everyone that we are quite a bit behind schedule as they probably haven’t heard this from their supervisors.
On the whole, our guys are keen to work but they lack direction and supervision.
We’ve told everyone if they want to work, they get here before 8am. At 08:10am the gates are shut. We’ll see how this works tomorrow.
I forgot to mention last week that the Film crew who were supposed to turn up last Friday, didn’t.
They are now coming on 13th, along with the minister so that’ll be fun. At least this time the client will be here and although he thinks he needs me to stand alongside him, I’ll be making sure he does most of the talking.
Our mixer, Kelly floats and some concreting tools turned up yesterday- air freighted from Paris. The mixer is bigger than we thought- see photo, but we’re still looking for alternatives. The Chinese have been typically hard to deal with unfortunately so I’ve made enquiries elsewhere and have talked to the client about purchasing one.
We had one of our frequent Power cuts on yesterday on site which lasted for about 3 hours. This was preceded by a number of outages on Saturday.
This obviously curtails the use of power tools and welders etc and also knocks out the printers and wireless network so it’s somewhat inconvenient.
We also had the air force flying over yesterday on a training run- see dodgy photo.
This happens a few times a week. They take off from the airfield just to the east of the site and then circle around for the morning.
Presumably till their Russian made Helicopters run out of gas.
I had hoped that one of them was going to hover over the site, select the main contraactor's foreman in his sights and simply vaporise him with large calibre rounds.
Unfortunately this didn’t happen so again we had to tell him how disappointed we are etc etc etc.
And on that note, I’ll leave you to it.
Me
