What's All That Noise???

At 5:45 Friday morning, three big pickup trucks full of rather large men and their equipment pulled up to my house. Lest you think this was a midnight raid of some sort, I WAS expecting them! I had to wait until it got light enough to take a picture, but you can see that the "Big Deal" was CONCRETE!


The first of the Cement Mixer Trucks was scheduled to arrive at 6:00 - and they arrived only a few minutes after that. Oregon has been having a real heat-wave and Contractor Jim didn't want to risk doing a a big concrete pour in the 100+ weather only to have the concrete set up and crack before the finishers could get it smooth and level. I didn't realize that 2000 sf could take so much concrete! Four truck-fulls (is that a word?) to make it a 6" thick pad... after all, it is a shop as well as a garage, and you never know what Henry is going to be working on in there!




The crews were finished and gone by 1:30 PM, and then the job of keeping it wet began. We get our water from a spring, so the trick was to balance the water on the pad with the level in the Spring House.


Henry did run the cistern dry at first, but caught the change in water flow before the pump actually started sucking air, over-heating, and failing! He did some recharge/flow calculations (you know how much he loves the statistical-tactical part of Engineering!) and got the situation balanced perfectly. We need to keep the concrete wet for as long as we can, but a minimum of three days, which will give us 80% strength in the concrete. So far, we've been OK, the heat has broken a bit and today is even overcast. Henry says the longer the wet-cure, the stronger the pad will be... up to 100% at seven days. I don't think he will do all seven days, but I'm guessing here (diminishing returns if three will give us 80%). I suppose it depends on when Jim is scheduled to return with the framing crew.