Concrete Progress

Despite temperatures in the 100s, Phil has been gamely working for hours each day on the metal building. On the Fourth of July, he used the tractor and his muscle and pulled and prodded form boards, meshed in concrete, until there were eight to go.

Most boards were horrible to extract, requiring digging, chipping, prying and more prying.

Yesterday, the fifth, he continued to extract boards. Three more out. Five to go.

Then he drove up to town to rent a special concrete drill. He used it to make three different sized holes in the concrete. Before he could drill, though, he had to spend several hours marking the precise spots where the bolts would go. A quarter inch off, and the building wouldn't work right.

I am glad he thought to split that task apart from the initial pour. Knowing how fast he was running during the pour, I cannot imagine also trying to put in bolts with such slim margins of error. And then maybe Bitsy's plunge into the wet concrete would have made the effort obsolete anyway.

He drilled all the several dozen holes before dark fell. (It wasn't much cooler then: still 95 degrees around 10pm. But once the sun drops, the intensity of the heat feels more bearable.)

This morning he again drove to town to return the drill. Back home, he read up on the unique bonding agent (glue or epoxy): once mixed, like concrete, there's a limited time to work before it sets. Rather than get that started in the blazing heat, he opted to continue to sledgehammer out the remaining boards.

He had a new pry bar, longer and flatter. That made a huge difference. Two more out.

Around 4:30, I finished reading to the boys for the afternoon, and we all headed up the driveway to join him.

He had planned to clean up the site when he was done extracting form boards. But we could do that. He backed the truck up, and we started tossing broken boards, short support boards in the back.

After five minutes, I looked at Jadon and Abraham, working with me. They had sweat droplets running down their temples, red in the face, drooping. I let them off to go play in the shade. There's a part of me that thinks they should probably learn to work hard; but I felt light headed and ill: what would it be like for them?

I kept working. I started to be more conscientious about drinking kombucha, and as my body started sweating in earnest, I think my core temperature came down, and I didn't notice the heat as much.

Phil's shorts were thoroughly drenched by the end of the workday. I don't know how the pioneers did it, sans water bottles and electrolyte drinks, wearing (as I understand) shirt and pants. And the ladies, in their dresses, cooking over an open fire. I salute those early pioneers. They were way tougher than me.

Phil pulled another two boards. One more to go. Optimist that he is, he said, "I think I've figured out how to most efficiently remove these." But that last one turned out to be a stickler. He wrestled with that over an hour. Jadon and I stood on the pry bar while he did intricate things with a second bar and a sledgehammer. He used the tractor. He used his arm and back muscles.

He got it all the way out. In pieces, but out.

Next: he forced water into each hole he'd drilled, readying the holes for the bonding agent.

Then he started making the driveway into the metal building. Because we had to dig a foot down to extract the form boards, there's a good foot of concrete that needs to be ramped up to allow equipment to drive in.

There's only so much he can do right now. The soil is extremely dry, and mashing dry soil is sort of like trying to make a sand castle with dry sand: it just doesn't work very well. But he mashed it enough to drive the tractor into the interior space of the building. Where it will remain until he can push a foot of materials next to the foundation to create a ramp to get him out.

In that time, I finished picking up the wood. Two hours of gathering boards and tossing them in the truck.

It was amazing to me to contemplate how much materials handling went into the formwork. Phil cut the trees in the lower pasture. We chipped the limbs. He sawed the boards for weeks. He tried to pull a trailer of boards up the hill. Then Butch came and pulled him and the trailer up. He unloaded the boards. Butch helped him lay out the line for the foundation. Butch dug the trench. Phil did some finishing work to get it dug. Phil figured out how to build the formwork. He carted the boards to the site. After the formwork was built, he backfilled. The concrete came. It set. He spent a week trying to extract the boards. I spent several hours just gathering the pieces of broken boards. We have a pile of slightly damaged wood, ready to be sawed into smaller bits, or used as is.

That was a LOT of weight and effort to get to the foundation. Now comes the satisfying part: laying out the metal.

Even the bits we've uncovered so far have generated a wheelbarrow of old cardboard. I am SO happy to get this stuff cleared from the entrance to the farm. Get it away!

I think we both ended the day feeling encouraged with the progress. Phil feels like he has a clear picture of what needs to happen next, something he's struggled with (never having built a metal building before).

Years ago we had friends who built a strawbale house in the evenings and weekends. I remember watching their progress for those two years, amazed at how slow all the layout was, how minor appeared the progress. And, in some ways, how boring the pictures. I understand now, though, why they posted photos of the string, the foundation trench. It's all effort, and learning, and struggle. I get it.