I like flat slabs and I cannot lie

 We’ve had two concrete trucks out on our property and have been foundationing so hard. As a concrete truck virgin I didn’t  know much about concrete other than it takes sidewalk chalk pretty well.  So I  googled some shit about it so I wouldn’t  appear ignorant when the first truck showed up.

 Key points, refer to concrete as mud and talk about how it slumps. When the truck gets there let the driver know you want to look at the mud then say , "yeah that mud looks a little dry. I want more slump." That pretty much sums it up. That and you need help.

Luckily, we have some pretty reliable friends that have been willing to come help us and have made some new ones. The night before our first concrete truck it was just Brandon, Annabelle and myself. Armed with a bunch of kid snacks and some new barbies we were prepared for a total shit show.

At 9 PM we got a text from a fellow owner builder in the same neighborhood we had just met that afternoon saying him and his son could come help us. They saved our bacon pouring the footing and with our first experience with concrete trucks.

Michael and Don came out and helped pour our slab. At the end of the second concrete truck we had a pretty flat looking garage slab and learned that you can also refer to a bowl movement in terms of slump.

Our garage is bunker style with two of the walls being 7 foot high concrete cinder blocks built into the side of the hill. Those walls are reinforced with a bunch of rebar and need to be filled with concrete as they are bearing the load of the earth. Holly and Kaylee came out and helped us assemble the wall and played really hard with Annabelle. Our wall was completed but just needed to be filled.

The concrete truck chute couldn’t really reach that high and precisely hit the cinder block cores and a pump truck seemed a little over the top. Michael and Brandon engineered this crazy plan and six sigmaed the shit out of it.

We decided the easiest thing to do was to test the truck and trailer’s load capacity and buy 224 individual bags of concrete from the nearest  Home depot -45 minutes and one mountain pass away. Using a friend’s electric cement mixer he got from some old guy for free,  Michael mixed the concrete, poured it into the excavator bucket until there were  9 bags in it.  Brandon went up the side of the hill with the excavator and emptied it into a home made 6 foot long funnel, filling the walls. Then I used the world’s largest vibrator, (for concrete) and made sure the concrete made it to the bottom of the cores. Four pallets of concrete were mixed and installed in a day with minimal shoveling work.

To wrap up all our concreteing  I had to go to the concrete plant to pay for our “yards”. As soon as we got to the office to pay Annabelle had to go potty. It was a single stall bathroom and there was a driver in there destroying the place.  Annabelle was chattering away about having to go potty and singing every song from the movie Frozen. The guy flushed. Great I thought we can go. It was a courtesy flush. Several courtesy flushes and 20 minutes later the guy leaves rapidly without making eye contact. We get in there and Annabelle goes “Ma Ma!!!... What is that amazing smell?”..... The driver used Febreeze.

Stay tuned for framing where you refer to things as “on center”