Assignment work

Today i worked on the Stakeholders question of the assignment, carrying on from my previous work. Reasearching the roles and responsibilities of these people, i found information from various sites giving job descriptions of each one which helped me understand more than what i previously knew. I also went to moodle and looked at the house plans we were given and the details on the drawings were great, informing me of the responsibilities of the stackholders that work from the plans that the architect provide- such as drain layers on foundation drawings. I couldn't open the critical pathplan doccument from home, hopefully it will work soon. I started on a word doccument for it and i'm thinking i'll just imput the work i've done at a later stage.

Prelims 1st blog

As I haven’t completed any work experience on excavation, footings etc, I will talk about my experience on campus during our exercise on plotting out the points of a house plan and working out the heights of the contours the field. This exercise gave us the figures to calculate the excavations that will be needed before we begin digging footings.

First we had to measure out the boundary of our section.

We had to start with a datum which is a fixed height that we can relate measurements to, for this we used a manhole cover on the campus field.

We used a dumpy and E staff to measure the heights at different points on our section of a house plan we were given.

At four points along a side of a house we took a backsight, 2 intermediate sights and a foresight. We changed station which we did as an exercise to show us that we may need to change the position of the dumpy if a mark we need to take may be obstructed.

This exercise refreshed my memory of how to use the dumpy again; I haven’t used one since the profiling we did on the unitec house on the CAT course. The exercise taught me how to record different heights of a piece of uneven land which I could then use work out the amount of excavation that will need to take place to level that piece of land.

I did some research on site preparation. My findings were that a soil test of a section is recommended to be taken before a piece of land is to be built on. This determines the how well the soil will cope with a structure as well as drainage capabilities.

A site plan design is important in finding the best place for the building, best position for septic tank/sewer connections. Access for vehicles, driveway and protected trees and wetlands recognised. I found excavation can be very expensive so you only want to remove only as much as you need to, plus excavation can lead to erosion which can affect other pieces of the property.