Week #15

The structure is now 40% complete. To be clear, that gets you a building with exposed brick walls and openings for doors and windows. Plus, a roof, electric wires and plumbing lines in place. But no “finishes”: construction-speak for bathrooms, kitchens, lighting, plastered and painted walls, final flooring, etc.

We’re a day away from pouring a concrete floor for the living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom level of the residential side of the building (above the basement slab), as well as pouring concrete for the mezzanine level on the guest side of the building (above the ground level for two guest units).

It’s so nice to see the building grow. Overall I’m very impressed with the strength of the Balinese construction methods. Compared to wooden beams and plywood floors that are used in the USA, the concrete floors in Bali are incredibly well-built. There’s large support beams between big, fat columns and double layers of wire mesh for the concrete slabs. It’s a solid system that is also quite labor intensive, and so its understandable that such a system can’t be used in the USA because of high labor costs. With nail guns you can knock out a rough wooden floor in a day. Here it takes perhaps ten times as long for a proper concrete floor.