Technical Questions

The base for your garden office has to be stable and level. It’s not worth cutting corners. Before you start marking out the base, you need to equip yourself with a ball of string, wooden pegs, a hammer or mallet, a spade, a wheelbarrow, a tamper, a broom, some damp-proof membrane and some polythene or

During extremely cold weather concrete (particularly freshly laid concrete) can be damaged by frost and ice. When temperatures dip below 3°C, the chemical reactions that strengthen concrete slow down and can lead to weaker concrete. When fresh concrete cools below 0ºC the water in the mix freezes and expands, which can cause cracking internally and blistering of the surface. It is not

The compressive strength of concrete in the UK is measured with a cube test which provides the manufacturer and customer with the strength of the concrete at both 7 and 28 days. Concrete cubes are crushed in a testing laboratory where the compressive strength can be accurately measured.

The natural colour of concrete is grey because the colour of the cement used to make it is typically grey. The cement particles coat the sand and stone and hydraulically bind the materials together. Concrete can vary in shades of grey depending on the strength of the concrete. You may find, depending on the concrete

Concrete is a brilliant material that is a mixture of cement, water, sand and coarse aggregate, but how does concrete gain strength? The proportion of the constituent materials is what determines the strength the concrete reaches after 28 days. When the cement, sand, stone and water are mixed together, a chemical reaction occurs. The cement