Open a set of construction drawings and you are looking at two different languages on one site. One set shows how the building looks, feels and functions. The other shows how it stands up. Confusing the two is one of…
A slab that looks perfect on the drawing can still fail on site for one boring reason: somebody under-counted the dead load. The truth is, most slab problems start before a single bar is cut, at the moment the loads…
The truth is.. when a building falls, everyone in the construction industry asks the same question: what went wrong? On Friday 23 October 2026, a multi-storey building under construction on 9th Street in Eastleigh, Nairobi, collapsed in the afternoon. Our…
The truth is.. most premature road failures that get blamed on poor asphalt or weak subgrade start with one simple thing: water that had nowhere to go. After a heavy downpour in Nairobi, Kisumu or Mombasa, a road that holds…
Walk onto any busy site in Nairobi, Kisumu or Mombasa and the first thing you notice is the machinery. An excavator cutting a trench, a roller compacting a road base, a mixer turning concrete. Each machine was chosen for a…
A snag list tells you what is wrong on the day of handover. The defects liability period tells you who pays when something else goes wrong afterwards. Many young site engineers, foremen and subcontractors treat it as a formality, and…
A faulty earth on a site cabin can kill someone before anyone notices the problem. On a busy site with wet ground, steel scaffolding, welding sets and long extension leads, earthing and bonding are not paperwork. They decide whether a…
The correct mix ratio for plaster depends on where it goes. For most internal walls in Kenya, a 1:4 cement to sand mix by volume works well, while external walls usually need a richer 1:3 first coat followed by a…
A client walks onto your site with a plot, a rough brief and one question: “How much will this cost?” There are no drawings yet, no Bill of Quantities, and no contractor. The quantity surveyor still has to give a…
Ask three people on one project what the building’s “floor area” is and you can get three different numbers. The architect quotes one figure for the planning application, the quantity surveyor prices from another, and the client uses a third…
