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27 batches of concrete!
Jul. 1st, 2014 12:05 amToday has been productive. Since I came home from our mini vacation (remind me to post about that later--it deserves its own write-up) with an email from my colleagues at the Mine saying that they were happy with the paper draft and I could go ahead and submit it to the journal I spent the morning at the office. ( It took about 3.5 hours to get the submission together )
Then I biked home and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lord_kjar and I added re-bar to the frame for a concrete slab in the shed (which we had build the day before). The slab will be holding the huge lathe that we got from his dad when we picked up the tractor and the huge trailer. It has been sitting in our carport awaiting its move to its permanent home, so we are finally preparing said home for it so that we can get our carport back.
After that we counted the bags of concrete we had available, agreed that the 18 bags are NOT enough for that lathe base, and drove to the store to get more. Last time we did this be borrowed a trailer from the store, they loaded half a pallet worth of concrete bags (20 of them) onto the trailer and charged us about 1000 SEK to take them home (it isn't an option to put more than 1/2 a pallet worth of concrete onto the trailer at once). This time they said that they are out of that size bag, but if we want there are huge bags available. The huge bags hold the equivalent of a full pallet worth of the small bags, and so is much too big to put onto one of their trailers.
Therefore we went home and he got the tractor and huge trailer and went back to the store, while I took a nap. I slept for nearly an hour, and woke up on time to make a serving of oatmeal in the microwave and start eating it before he got back. Luckily, I was able to finish eating in the time it took for him to lift the bag off of the trailer and get it moved onto a pallet so that we could carry it into the shed. (He could lift it down using the carrying straps it comes with to dangle it from the forks, but the door to the shed isn't high enough to put the bag, which was well more than waist height, and as wide as a pallet, through like that, so instead he carried it on the forks from underneath.)
By this time it was 17:00, so rather than stopping to cook him dinner too, we opted to start to work straight away, since we wanted to be done with it before it got so late that the noise of the concrete mixer was too much.
We quickly settled into a routine: I would fill two small buckets (the kind they sell for normal house cleaning tasks) with dry concrete. He would pour them into the concrete mixer, and I would start filling the buckets back up again while he added water to the mixer. I normally had time to fill one of the two buckets before he had added enough water, and then we would carry together the large concrete bucket into the shed and dump it into the form. Then I would go back to the other shed and fill the second small bucket with more dry concrete while he spread out, shook, and smoothed the concrete we had just added. He normally finished that task about the time I had finished filling the small buckets, and we would dump out the wet concrete into the large bucket and set it aside while he emptied the next two dry buckets into the mixer and the whole process repeated again.
It took 27.5 batches of concrete done this way to completely fill the frame we had prepared, and now it is happily drying. In a few days we will have the fun of trying to get the huge lathe through that small shed door and onto the platform. That last half batch we used to start cementing together bricks to create a back wall to the large concrete rings that have been built into the earth cellar walls as interior cabinets. By the time we had done that and cleaned up 4 hour and ten minutes had elapsed since starting.
If I were sensible I would have called it a day there. But no, instead I took a shower, baked a cake, washed the mixing dishes while it baked, and started a load of laundry. That laundry should be done in another 15 minutes, and then after I hang it to dry I can do my yoga and head to bed. Tomorrow I need to re-do the submission again--somehow I missed out noticing that I need to add my own damn line numbers to the document--they don't do it for me (by the time I saw the email saying so I was too tired to turn on the work computer and deal with it) and he needs to do some work as well--one of his colleagues needs to fix some computer stuff on a system that can't be shut down whilst fixing it, and sincelord_kjar has way more experience with that type of job than the colleague, he agreed to give up a bit of vacation time to help out.
Then we can get back to work on the Earth Cellar in progress while we wait for today's concrete to finish drying.
Then I biked home and
lord_kjar and I added re-bar to the frame for a concrete slab in the shed (which we had build the day before). The slab will be holding the huge lathe that we got from his dad when we picked up the tractor and the huge trailer. It has been sitting in our carport awaiting its move to its permanent home, so we are finally preparing said home for it so that we can get our carport back.After that we counted the bags of concrete we had available, agreed that the 18 bags are NOT enough for that lathe base, and drove to the store to get more. Last time we did this be borrowed a trailer from the store, they loaded half a pallet worth of concrete bags (20 of them) onto the trailer and charged us about 1000 SEK to take them home (it isn't an option to put more than 1/2 a pallet worth of concrete onto the trailer at once). This time they said that they are out of that size bag, but if we want there are huge bags available. The huge bags hold the equivalent of a full pallet worth of the small bags, and so is much too big to put onto one of their trailers.
Therefore we went home and he got the tractor and huge trailer and went back to the store, while I took a nap. I slept for nearly an hour, and woke up on time to make a serving of oatmeal in the microwave and start eating it before he got back. Luckily, I was able to finish eating in the time it took for him to lift the bag off of the trailer and get it moved onto a pallet so that we could carry it into the shed. (He could lift it down using the carrying straps it comes with to dangle it from the forks, but the door to the shed isn't high enough to put the bag, which was well more than waist height, and as wide as a pallet, through like that, so instead he carried it on the forks from underneath.)
By this time it was 17:00, so rather than stopping to cook him dinner too, we opted to start to work straight away, since we wanted to be done with it before it got so late that the noise of the concrete mixer was too much.
We quickly settled into a routine: I would fill two small buckets (the kind they sell for normal house cleaning tasks) with dry concrete. He would pour them into the concrete mixer, and I would start filling the buckets back up again while he added water to the mixer. I normally had time to fill one of the two buckets before he had added enough water, and then we would carry together the large concrete bucket into the shed and dump it into the form. Then I would go back to the other shed and fill the second small bucket with more dry concrete while he spread out, shook, and smoothed the concrete we had just added. He normally finished that task about the time I had finished filling the small buckets, and we would dump out the wet concrete into the large bucket and set it aside while he emptied the next two dry buckets into the mixer and the whole process repeated again.
It took 27.5 batches of concrete done this way to completely fill the frame we had prepared, and now it is happily drying. In a few days we will have the fun of trying to get the huge lathe through that small shed door and onto the platform. That last half batch we used to start cementing together bricks to create a back wall to the large concrete rings that have been built into the earth cellar walls as interior cabinets. By the time we had done that and cleaned up 4 hour and ten minutes had elapsed since starting.
If I were sensible I would have called it a day there. But no, instead I took a shower, baked a cake, washed the mixing dishes while it baked, and started a load of laundry. That laundry should be done in another 15 minutes, and then after I hang it to dry I can do my yoga and head to bed. Tomorrow I need to re-do the submission again--somehow I missed out noticing that I need to add my own damn line numbers to the document--they don't do it for me (by the time I saw the email saying so I was too tired to turn on the work computer and deal with it) and he needs to do some work as well--one of his colleagues needs to fix some computer stuff on a system that can't be shut down whilst fixing it, and since
lord_kjar has way more experience with that type of job than the colleague, he agreed to give up a bit of vacation time to help out. Then we can get back to work on the Earth Cellar in progress while we wait for today's concrete to finish drying.
