Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

The senior project manager has been away this week so the atmosphere has been much more relaxed, fewer signs have been printed and more decisions made.

A significant portion of the car park slab in my block was poured last Friday.  We take it in turns to stay late and lock up the site and the more experienced members of the team saw me off, the slab was brush finished which apparently requires the concrete to be just right and means that the new boy gets to stay on site until 1930! 

Politics have been interesting this week, relations with the sub-contractor are somewhat strained and the delays in the build are growing and it has all become a bit odd.  I’m trying to avoid getting involved if I’m perfectly honest, I’m quite interested in seeing how civilians resolve conflict.  The activity that has brought this to a head has been the standard of the gas membrane that is being placed under each of the blocks.  An extensive ground investigation and gas monitoring survey found that they is no gas on site, the building inspectors decided that the inclusion of a gas membrane is the minimum they expect and rather than spend the time and money in trying to convince them that there is no need Osborne decided that it was easier to just get on with it rather than fight public sector bureaucracy (I’m sure we all agree it was probably the right decision).  Now this means that we have to fit the membrane correctly as it is inspected before each slab pour, unfortunately the sub-contractor is trying to pay it the least amount of attention possible.  The slab pour that went ahead last week had membrane workmanship that was pretty poor, the inspector came to look at it and only just passed it; because of this we have been rigid on standards this time around and this has caused arguments between the one of the site managers (who does need lessons in diplomacy from time to time) and the sub-contractor’s foreman.

This week I’ve been acting as student liaison, on Tue I had a graphic design student to take around site to take photos (including yours truly) for a project on construction, the process of getting all of these photos approved by the companies who have an interest has been slightly painful as the on site computers can’t deal with the size of the photos and I’ve had to bring them all home to resize and send on.  On Wed I had about 12 students from the University to come and ask questions for their Construction Management assignment, their question set was identical to the one that I completed 11 years ago for the same lecturer and slightly more recently for you Mike.  A lot of the questions looked similar to AER 1 and so I provided them with a copy of that (but didn’t tell them that I’d also sent it to the lecturer to stop them copying) and a few other bits and pieces.  All of this is so we can grab a few more points for considerate constructors.

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