Pouring Concrete

The concrete footer is finally done!  With the three of us and some help from Randall, Glenn and Ray we were able to get the entire footer done.  We had no choice but to do it over a span of a few days so we had to make some cold joints in the footer, but it all worked out OK.

Lisa and John did the mixing, we used a premixed sand and gravel from our local gravel pit mixed that with water and portland cement and ta-da...we have concrete.  (side note...if we can do it, ANYONE can do it)





 
Ken put the mix in the forms and smoothed it out making sure that the cold joints were in the right places according to the prints and making sure that the mix was in and around the rebar for the best compaction.

With the help of family and friends who came over on various days we had them run the tractor back and forth between the mixer and the forms.

 

We still have a few more things to pour, but they are small.  We have a total of 7 piers inside that need to be placed and the footer for the fireplace.  The toughest part of that is going to be the fireplace, we don't know which one we are going to use so it is hard to know just how big to make the footer.  The print calls for 6" in each direction in addition to the size of the fireplace unit, so at this point we have looked at several companies online and we have chosen the dimensions of the largest one and we will add our 6" to that figure; it may end up being overkill, but we don't want to guess too small since adding concrete later would not be an option.

 

Although no one likes mixing concrete, try to get as many friends or family to help you as you can get...you will NEED them!