July 7, 2010: The concrete trucks arrive for the first pour. This was a really exciting day for all of us, but scary! The cardboard tubes you see are forms used to create the piers for the porch.
It takes a lot of hands on deck to keep the concrete moving in the forms. Although you think of concrete as moving slow, when it's being poured out of a truck, it all happens really fast. And scraping the concrete down through the forms is extremely physical labor.
Getting the concrete moving down the step and into the lower trench is tricky. If the end of the form blows out, that's really bad!
Trying to get the concrete to stay in the cardboard forms is tricky also.
Brett & Don tried putting rocks on the base to weight it down, and at one point we even had several people standing on top of the base, but the weight of the concrete pouring down the tube was too great.
The weight of the concrete made the tube raise up in the air.
Brett had to go to plan B, which turned out to be building a wooden box around the base of each tube and filling the box with dirt and rocks to keep it in place. Another plan for another day, lesson learned!
But the footer went according to plan (thank goodness).
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