Friday 22 October 2010

The Footings

What a task doing the concrete in footings is. Our trenches had filled with water due to the inclement weather! It p****d it down for a good 24 hours! I went to Tain and bought a water pump, we put the concrete delivery off until Friday afternoon then we spent Thursday trying to sweep the water to where the pump was, ever tried sweeping water uphill. Also all the breeze blocks and cement were delivered in the rain, while we're trying to empty the water out of the trenches!!!!! I attempted to move the cement to the barn, big mistake, I didn't realise how heavy a bag of cement is. So that job got left for Iain (a lot of jobs get left for Iain)
Friday morning arrives, quite reasonable weather (not raining), I sweep water to the pump again while Iain puts the pipe in (you'll see it on the photos, when published), then we were ready for the concrete.
The concrete arrived at 1:30pm and he could only put it in part of the trenches, so after he'd filled one (small, very small) corner, he filled the digger bucket and Iain drove it to different parts of the trenches while I raked the concrete to the middle, and anywhere else that the digger couldn't get to. Raking concrete reminded me of when I was small and used to make mud pies, but 2 hours of raking concrete definitely does not. We had a small patch to fill in with rocks to stop the concrete going that way and (owning up here big time) I rolled a large rock to the top of the slope and it fell on Iain's hand, he has a large lump on it now that is going black :-(
After that came the tamping, so while Iain was making a suitable tamping tool, (A lump of wood with 2 more bits of wood screwed to it for handles) I raked a higher part to a lower part and in the process of doing this, my iphone fell out of my pocket into the concrete.............It still works but I don't think I'll be able to charge it when the battery dies as the socket bit is full of concrete.
Anyway back to the tamping, I'm just not tall enough to straddle a trench and manhandle a lump of wood trying to bash the concrete (I'm sure we were just doing it to make that pattern you see on concrete), so David had to take over, luckily by this time (5pm) he was just getting up (he works nights).
The footings are in, next is blockwork!
Pictures to follow.

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