The House - Days 3&4

Day 3: Sunday. Pouring concrete. I've poured concrete a few times in my life, but I think it's always been from a truck...While it's difficult, the truck comes with the concrete already made. Not this time...With only 0.75 cubic meters (about 26 cubic feet) to pour, it's not worthwhile to bring in a truck. So we load the cement mixer into Jean-Christophe's trailer, bring it to the house, then we go to buy the supplies. JC's trailer is a fairly small affair and we needed to buy about 600kg (1400lbs) of sand. We decide to do it in two loads...Get the sand, set off, strange noise...'Oh crap, the bearings in the wheels are broken!' Well we've only got a mile to go, let's do it and see. It turns out that the wheel wasn't screwed on correctly, but the bearings are fine! Second trip, doubts about the sand...let's buy a little more just in case. Great! That should do fine.

Start mixing the stuff...man, masons are not weak people...my arms, back, legs, ok basically everything are killing me and I just want to be done.

Anyway, we bang that out all morning, and...run out of sand at 2pm...with a piece that was about 1x1.5 feet left to do! Of course we can't buy any sand because it's Sunday afternoon! Ugh. Oh well, no problem we'll finish tomorrow, but still I like to get stuff done all at once.

Anyway, Monday morning we finished the cement and moved upstairs to start working on the ceiling. Of course in our rush to do things we cut a piece of sheetrock backwards so now our ceiling is bi-colored! Oh well, once it's painted it'll all look the same. There's some more pictures below.

Tuesday and Wednesday are dedicated to my company and Thursday we're back in the house working.