The past week has been great in terms of learning and the task we did. Our focus was on the set out and installation of concrete formwork and our task involved the setting out of a monolithic house slab.

We used a real house plan from a Australind homeswest house and set the whole house out using pegs, hurdles and string lines. I was glad to have the opportunity to practise set out again because I wasn’t so confident about the process before but now I believe I’ve got it pretty well covered.

The task for the concrete form work involved quantifying the materials we needed, manufacturing the formwork, digging footings and assembly and installation of the form work. We worked in teams of three and I was pretty happy with the end result. We finished with some strong, rigid formwork. The only thing that could have been better, and I was responsible for most of this, was the ends of the formwork were not cut square during the manufacture stage which caused us a bit of lost time cutting it in the field.

We've also slotted in a few tests in the last few days on wall framing, explosive power tools and wall framing. It took a bit out of me doing it all in a week because there was a lot of revision to do but i think I did ok in all of them.