Saturday, August 4, 2007

Concrete- Day Three

Today the trucks arrived right on schedule at 10:00 am and 10:30. I ordered 12 yards this time and it was just enough, maybe 10 gallons leftover, for the 4.5 thick 10.75 foot wide and 54 foot long pour with 16" deep angled haunches. The Concrete Slab Pour Calculator was a huge help. I had carefully backfilled the forms on this west side with dirt and oiled the screedboard, which made life a whole lot easier. Charity and I screeded, Drew and Laura raked and hoed. Having an experienced driver, pourer makes a HUGE difference as well-try pushing a mountain of concrete with a screedboard. I started to get the hang of bullfloating today as well- jumped on it after our was completed. Then the magnesium hand float for the areas around obstacles like protruding pipes, then finish tamping and troweling the edges as the concrete began to slowly set up. After that it was about time to finish the outside edges with the edger, which left a nice 3 inch edge that was helpful in layout for setting the 6" anchor bolts (Today's lesson:I had found that marking the forms with blue painters tape made it easier and faster to find the marks I had made to set the bolts-crayon is hard to see with dripping screedoff running down the form). By 1 pm I was cleaning up. I went to bed at 8pm. We pulled it off, now just the back porch to pour, then it's time to make sawdust. Drew, Laura, and Charity were a big help.

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