Abracadabra your new home is here
Little over a month after construction began, Karatara’s first-ever RDP house still requires utility connections, but the house was duly built in the two weeks that the contractors said it would take them to do so.
Construction began on the historic and new-and-improved house on 26 August, when B&V Contractors started clearing out and levelling the ground on which the approximately 40m² house would be built.
The day thereafter the concrete slab was laid, and from there Cape Island Construction (CIC) took over the project, having championed and pioneered the building of the house.
While CIC and Namandla Construction were the main driving forces behind the project, the construction of the houses was a collaborative effort between a whole host of local and other SA construction companies and also formed part of Knysna Municipality’s Mandela Day initiatives earlier this year.
Taking a different approach to RDP houses elsewhere, CIC employed innovative building technologies (IBT) methods to construct the house by using autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) blocks. These blocks have numerous benefits, including having double the fire-resistance rating of a normal brick, they’re three times more thermally efficient, and are easier to build within terms of speed and accuracy. When construction began, CIC managing director Cameron Ward-Able predicted it would take builders two weeks to build the house, thanks to the improved building speed provided by the AAC blocks.
True to their word, the house was built and ready within two weeks, but will only be ready for occupation once the municipality completes connections to the electrical grid and sewerage and water systems.
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Source: Knysna Plett Herald News