Securing roof to walls

Mixing concrete goes like this, important it is to keep things in this order;
Three buquets of water, one bag and a half of cement which is about 30 kilos (17 pounds), six shovels of medium gravel and three of sand. Let mix and then add until completing 24 sholvels of gravel and 12 of sand. Add water little by little to get the right feeling of it at the end.
We pulled it up in buquets and pour it on top of the walls for binding the structure, pretty solid.

Wheather wasn't all that good for this job, but got it done just the same.
I don't have too many pics of these days. It was all about getting the joists in place and screw them to the top with ten inch long screws, driving a line along the walls to make sure they were all leveled and squaring them perfectly. The walls were off square by a minimal 6 inches at the widest place against the first joist. Also we made the overhang on the south side, 4 feet wide and held on "tails" over the wall screwed into the first transversal joist, see it on the first (Luis was working at it) and third picture.

Weight bearing beams - Vigas de carga

After setting the summit beam, a bigger crane with more accurate handling was needed to set the fisrt floor bearing beams right in place, into their corresponding seats in the walls. As with the top one, they were both lifted over the walls and into through the opening and swang into their spots and on top of the pillars. Here comes beam number 1.

























































































And now number 2...















swinging it into place...




















working the seat into the wall to make it nice and flat.






























After siting the beams into place, we worked both pillars corresponding to the second floor and placed them by hand, with their ¨mensulas¨which are those kind of shoulders on top of the pillars and under the beam, the name comes from latin for ¨table¨.




































The awning was absolutely needed at this point for the merciless sun and eventual rain; we didn´t want the wood to get wet if we could avoid it.