INSTEAD, CONCRETE BLOCKS

Te Ao Hou, October 1958, Page 47

INSTEAD, CONCRETE BLOCKS Finally we decided that we should use the only other material cheaply available locally—the shingle and sand at the mouth of a nearby river. At first sight, this seemed to be an ambitious project. Concrete construction was criticised adversely, since the house would be cold and it would leak in the heavy rainfall. In any case, we had not the equipment to handle concrete. All these criticisms proved to be false. We used concrete blocks made on the beach. We put down a slab of concrete on the beach—a smooth floor on which to lay out the blocks to dry—and we borrowed a couple of ‘lightning’ block moulds, for blocks 18in. × 8in. × 6in. With konaki and horses we sledged the aggregate to the house site, and carted the finished blocks from the beach. Two men could build 100 blocks per day, and catch a few fish off the beach in between mixes. The mixture was 5—1 with some silicate of soda (Sharlands's egg preservative) to waterproof the blocks. This has worked well, since the houses have proved to be leak-proof. Sharlands's preservative became expensive, so we finally used 4-gallon drums of a similar and much cheaper solution. It did not take the adaptable Maori long to learn the tricks of a dryish mix, and excellent blocks were soon being turned out on the beach. Even today, often when jobs are scarce, the boys will turn out hundreds of blocks and sell them to the pakeha, who also has become block-minded, for sheds, pigsties, and even cottages like ours. In fact, the houses we built have become the fashion in the district, since the construction is within most people's ability and pocket. Many of our local cowsheds are built on the lines pioneered in this district by the commencement of our housing efforts. We had our troubles to begin with until we learned the tricks of the trade. At first we were confused in the construction of a house, because corners, window openings, door openings, &c., need odd-sized blocks to fit the plan. Our supervisor made scale models, and marked the dimension on each scale block of the wooden model, so that even a child could tell which block fitted the wall. As a matter of fact, the house should be designed with walls and partitions of a certain suitable length, so that few odd blocks are required. Three sizes of blocks only are thus necessary for plain house designs. This makes it much easier for the amateur builder, since there is little delay in matching the blocks for corners, openings, chimney space, and other odd places such as porches.