The day of the place

At 8:30 am I call Redi-Mix (not the dance club). "Concrete," the guy says. I say,

"I need 3 yards of 5 inch slump for this afternoon." He says,

"What strength do you want?" I say,

"It's for a garage pad." He says,

"So 3500 (something or other I didn't catch) and 5 yards?" I say,

"3 yards." He says,

"Right. What time?" I say,

"2 o'clock?" He says,

"It'll be there." That was the most fun conversation of the day.

After that I got in my truck and headed for Rite-Way in Stinkler to pick up the bull-float and the power trowel. While there I was propositioned to sell my truck. It would be easier to sell myself, I tell the guy. Probably more moral too. I love my truck. There's no two ways about it.

Coming back through Altona I pick up the angle iron I ordered from Allen Penner (I phoned him at 9:30 pm last night to ask for it, and he had it ready for me by 9 am this morning! Can you beat small town service?!) at Sunland Steelworks, which I've devised to use as helpmeet for skreeding. That might have been the best purchase of the day, because I don't know how we'd have skreeded the pad flat without it as a guide. Allen's a great guy who lives in the village and works in town and goes to the Holdeman church. He's a good welder too. If a guy can weld, he can go to any church he likes, if you ask me.

Back at home we do the final preparations for the placement: level up and fasten the angle iron; prepare the 2x4s to use as skreeds; generally get psyched. Then we have lunch.

At 2 pm the truck arrives, and we're off. I'm not going to say it was easy, but I am going to say it went better than I expected. GeeVs, M, and I worked well together. We didn't get pissed off at each other (much). We worked steady for about 2 hours, and then the concrete was placed, skreeded, and floated, and looked like this:

GeeVs, wary of the stalking wheelbarrow.

Then we waited. But not really long enough, because when we thought we could get on it with the power trowel, it was a bit wet, like this:

Notice all the footy prints. Too deep. Too wet.

So we cut our losses, took care of the footprints, and went in for supper. At about 7:20 I got back out there, fired up the power trowel and power trowelled away till about 9:30 (had to add a spritz of water now and then to make things work) . Then fiddled a bit with hand trowel, and we ended up with a garage pad that looks like this:

Not bad. Not perfect, but given that I place about 1 pad of concrete every 7 years, I think I've improved. I'd say that pretty thorough planning, thanks to little-big bro T for all the oral help (heehee), and more tenacity with the power trowel made all the difference. 

People, we have a garage pad!