Our ready mixed concrete duly arrived this morning, 8am sharp! We managed to
get our little extension chute installed on the dumper truck in time and
park it over by the Loke.
But when the concrete lorry arrived, he had only one extension chute himself
and wouldn’t or couldn’t reach our dumper truck. So we had to drive the
truck up onto the upper level, and only just managed to get their chute to
go into our skip!!
Anyway, it went reasonably smoothly after that, went back and forth a half
dozen times, distributing the concrete all the way along our trench. That
phase took 45minutes to empty his lorry load of concrete!
It then took us a further 7 hours to push and shove the piles of wet gravel
concrete into all the corners and in and around the re-bars, then chump it
down, level it off, and get a fairly flat finish. We couldn’t use the float
at the end as the mix had already set too hard by then.
Concrete poured and compacted
We stumbled and staggered back in doors after cleaning the dumper and
wheelbarrow plus tools with the garden hose, washed our gloves and overalls
of the worse of the cement. We had put on latex gloves underneath our tough
rubber coated gloves to protect our hands from the alkaline burns. Thanks
goodness!!
So at last, the swimming lane, currently 22.75metres long, now has a
foundation formed and it is now curing and hardening. All the reinforcing
rods are sticking out of the concrete, ready for the hollow concrete blocks
and we can then rebuild the ground up behind the soon to be new wall and
rebuild the fence again!!
The last 3 or 4 days has been very, very hectic getting everything ready!!
Phew! We will have a day or two off now to recover!!