Oh, the pain

You know, I could make this entire post about the bits of me that hurt right now, but it would take up a lot of screen space. Here's a short list: hands, feet, legs, arms, wrists, and back. Oh, jebus, my aching back...

But you didn't come to read another edition of the injury report (I also have a couple of nasty scrapes from where I unloaded the concrete mixer by myself because I'm an idiot), so on with the concrete show!

We started the day by realizing that we were late picking up the mixer, so I rushed off to get it while the War Department lazed about in bed with the cats. (Hey, I write the blog, so you get my version of events! I don't care that she was up and organizing the basement by the time I got back, I like my story better.) While Amy prepped the basement and got the hoses out, I set up the mixer in the side yard by the window:



If you're very quiet, you might be lucky enough to catch a very rare sighting of the War Department in her natural habitat...



Once everything was ready, we mixed up one bag of concrete with a whole bottle of the bonding agent into a thin slurry. (Am I the only one who loves that word? slurry... Seriously, that's a good word.) Then Amy painted the mixture onto all of the rough edges of the concrete while I farted about taking pictures and getting in the way. (That's what she's doing in the shot above.) We let the bonding agent dry a little bit, and then started mixing and pouring concrete. It was pretty much just a straight slog from that point, but here are some of the highlights:

• In the beginning, I brought 21 of the original 32 bags of concrete from the garage to the side yard, partly because I wasn't sure I'd need all 32 bags, partly because it was sort of overcast and I didn't want to move all those bags back into the garage if it started raining, and mostly because after 5 trips with the wheelbarrow, my arms were going to fall off.


• I started by mixing two bags at a time, emptying the concrete into buckets which I then passed through the window to Amy, who dumped them into the holes. She would start smoothing out and leveling the concrete while I mixed up the next batch. After a while, I kinda got the hang of it, and moved up to mixing three bags at a time.


• About halfway through the second hole, the big one on the workshop side of the bathroom wall, we realized that we weren't going to have enough concrete. Amy figured we'd need at least four more bags, and sent me off to Rona to get six more. When I got there, I figured I might as well play it safe and bought eight. We wound up using all of them, with not even a bucketful left over.


• We finished up about quarter-to-five, but by the time I had rinsed out the mixer and got it loaded in the back of the truck (ouch! again!), it was five-to. Amy called the rental place (we had to have the mixer back by 5:00 or pay for an extra day), but even though she said I was on my way and would be there in 10 minutes, the guy told her bluntly that they were closing in five minutes and hung up. Nice. So the mixer cost us $60+ instead of $30+, but you know what? It was worth every penny.


• Amy did all of the smoothing, troweling, and grading. I just ran the mixer, rinsed the concrete off the tools on a semi-regular basis, and did most of the heavy lifting.

All in all, it was a hell of a lot of work for one day. But we finished! We now have a basement floor - with no cat tracks! Imagine!

Here are a series of shots showing our work. The first of each pair shows the concrete after pouring, the second after letting it cure overnight (still not quite ready to walk on):










Look! No more hole to the outside!



Okay, so that's probably more pictures of concrete than you really wanted to see, but we're pretty proud of the job we did.

So on Sunday, we cleaned up most of the dirt and mud on the rest of the floor and tidied up the work bench. Amy patched most of the holes in the slab (and the giant hole left by the old water service in the side of the house) with hydraulic cement while I fixed the plumbing under the kitchen sink. Yes, I fixed the plumbing. (Yes, I left a bowl under the drain just in case I didn't fix it right and we haven't run the dishwasher yet, which will REALLY test it, but I'm pretty sure it's good.)

All in all, it was arguably the most work we've managed in a weekend so far. 40 fricking bags of concrete. Oh, my aching back.

Yes, we both took our Vitamin I and plenty of Vitamin Beer. Probably shouldn't have ground one up and dissolved it in the other, but what are ya gonna do?