Crooked Little House - Part 3

Today my little project of spying on the neighbourhood builders became an exercise in mutual voyeurism.  Now four storeys high, the new apartment building suddenly seems quite close, and the builders notice as soon as I step onto my balcony.  There is lots of grinning, and they call out to me a bit, but I can't understand what they are saying so we just all acknowledge one another with smiles. 

The person squatting there in the dark blue top with the bright yellow frilly hat is a woman - the first I've seen on a Vietnamese building site.  She was also wearing one of those facemasks that the motorbike riders wear, but she kept pulling it down so she could grin at me.  Her job today was pulling nails out of timber so the timber can be reused.

When I first looked at the construction site, I thought that those long rust coloured piles (or frames, or whatever they are) you can see sticking up for the beginning of the next floor, and also on the front edge of the floor, were iron.  But actually they are just light wood - probably plywood.  The builders nail them in place as they begin each floor, thread long metal rods through them and then pour the concrete (by hand of course) into them.  Once the concrete is dry, they pull them off and use them again for the next level.

The concrete on the floor they were were working on today was poured yesterday.  Here's a video of the process. 

Today it is dry already, and you can see that they have already started to put up the next floor.  I don't know how tall this building is going to be, but they look as though they've got a bit of work to do yet!

Crooked Little House - Part 2

There is an apartment building being built on my street. The project is progressing so quickly that is really difficult to believe - especially when you consider how low tech the materials and processes in comparison with similar projects back home.

This is a view of the site today from my balcony.

The floor that was being built last week has been completed, one layer of flooring has already gone down, and they are putting a layer of concrete down today.  The entire building is iron frames, bricks and mortar and hand-poured concrete. 

These guys are really small, but very strong.  They spend all their days hauling buckets of concrete and bricks. They have to work really quickly to pour the concrete out and level it before it dries.

They use a pulley system to get the concrete up to the floor levels they are working on.

The pulley is powered by some kind of fuel - I doubt it's diesel.  It sounds like two-stroke lawnmower engine and it billows out great puffs of black smoke.

 That's pulley operator down there in the hat. 

The concrete is mixed by hand in one of those old-fashioned concrete mixers.  I took this picture on the walk home from the restaurant the other night.

Even concrete mixers need to sleep.

Crooked Little House - Part One

Saigon is close to the equator, and so all the days are about the same length. There are no late summer nights, and no late winter mornings either. Dawn starts to break at around 5 am, and by 6 many people are already very busy into their day - including the builders who are putting up a new apartment block on our street.  Every morning we are woken by the light pushing it's way through all the cracks in the curtains, and that same light is heralded by the banging and crashing of the builders tools and hammers in the street below. It's as if they were celebrating the sunrise with a parade of drums and cymbals, in the same way that the Hare Krishnas welcome the Friday night sunset with their parade down Queen Street.

The building site today.

When we first moved in, the building site was a few holes in the ground, and I regret it now, but I didn't think to take any pictures at the time. We watched the foundations being built and the concrete being poured, by hand, into the holes.  It all seems pretty precarious and undoubtedly not earthquake-proof!

I got my first pictures at around February 24th, when we realised that the building going up was going to incorporate the existing building on the section behind.

While it would be a bit of a stretch to call this an ecologically-conscious project - it is interesting to see how much building material is recycled and reused.

You can see that a lot of the materials in the
foreground here are pre-loved.

 
In the shots below, you can see the lengths that were gone to to demolish parts of the existing building below without damaging the valuable bricks it was built from.  Three or four men worked up there for about three days, knocking the bricks out one by one.

The pile of bricks behind the 2 guys on the lower
level are all salvaged

This was an exceptionally NOISY day!

I am fairly certain that the building I am living was built in pretty much the same way as this one.  Our building is quite new, and there are a lot of similar building projects happening in the neighbourhood. You might remember this shot of all the rooftops I can see from my balcony window.

Most older buildings in Saigon are 3-4 short storeys high.

In a few years time I'm sure that that view will be greatly changed, as the older buildings are pulled down one by one, and new, high-rise building (which can collect much higher rents) go up.