Second Floor Slab Pour

Again it's been too long, but we have valid excuses, for example now being 3000 miles away from Casa Den, home in Port hope, Ontario, Frozen Canada.

As Lencho, crew, and Alvaro worked away after that last post, it was unclear if they would get to the point of pouring the second floor slab before our anticipated departure of Wendesday, January 15. There hard work and two helpful errors made it happen. For one, we learned that January 15 was Thursday, and gained a day, and then learned that the new tennants at Derek & Christine's were going to be late so we could stay an extra day (As of Jan.22, they still haven't shown up so we could have stayed even longer!).

The pour went ahead on Wednesday. On Tuesday night things weren't ready...the forms weren't complete, the steel wasn't all in, the electrical boxes weren't all placed. Oh, and Derek and I increased the size of the deck again, wrapping it around the east side over the doorway to shelter that door, and to not have a beam prominently visible on the edge of the slab. But Wednesday morning a bigger-than-usual crew got to work and things got going quickly. All of the items above and more (hauling soil up to fill in the space between the lower and upper bathroom slabs, finishing touches on the big ramp needed for the guys to climb up with buckets of concrete) were completed and the pour started at about 1:30 in the partly-cloudy afternoon. A secondary group of about 10 guys came, with their modified 5-gallon buckets and flip-flops, about noon and had been waiting for their work to start.

Again it was the synchronized system of one crew loading cement, sand, gravel, and water into the little gas mixer, wheeling the barrel over to dump it on the ground (actually, a thin concrete slab, now) behind, and flipping it back over to start over. They were using half a 50-kilo (110 lb) bag of concrete, 2 buckets of sand, and three of rocks each time, so they needed to do that about 110 times for this (the largest) slab. Two others continuously shoveled the mix into buckets, three worked up top on the placement and troweling, etc., and the rest hauled buckets of mud up a steep ramp. There wasn't a shortage of water this time, so no reason for a break, and they had it all up there a little after 4:00 pm. One nice thing about using a crew instead of a truck is that Derek spotted two different problems with the steel placement that would have been much harder to get fixed if a tuck was waiting, costing by the minute.

Then it was Cabro time. We had made the decision to arrange with the neighbor lady to provide the crew a post-pour dinner, rather than bring a bunch of chickens this time, and when the option of goat instead of chicken came up, the crew was all for goat. I hope it wasn't one of the cuter ones. She and Pedro (and daughters) did a great job with rice, beans, tortillas, soup, and soda, and then Lencho and I each sprang for a case of beer. After the feast our masons went back up to finish trowelling the slab, and all was in good shape by sunset (now visible from slab-level).