All About Grout

As the weather continues cool, we have to delay starting until the temperature reaches 40 (lower than 40, we would need to heat the water first: no thanks!). This morning, we headed out at 9:30 to deal with rebar, though we wouldn't start actually pouring until about 11am.

Phil had ended yesterday with most of the 10' rebar in their proper places.

It's hard to get a good sense of just how tall 10' of rebar poking above the foundation is: it's surprising how fortress-like the space now feels.

My first task was to tie them off to the original rebar. There's an overlap of almost three feet, giving much strength. (Sadly, I am not a very capable rebar-tie person, and Phil had to spend almost an hour later, throwing up the level and adding more tie-wire as needed to make them as perfectly straight as he could. Some of the bars had already had grout around them for some time. A frustrating task.)

Shortly after 11am, with about five hours of daylight left, we started our first batch of grout. Grout uses the same Type I-II cement that we used for the foundation, but the proportions are different: one part cement to two parts peastone to three parts sand. And rather than about two buckets of water, it needed about three buckets. It's meant to be really soupy. (I thought it looked like cow poops in the spring when the cows first go to the green grass.)

The challenge about pouring grout is that it has to hit a target about eight inches wide. If the tractor doesn't move, at the beginning of a pour, it runs off the inner edge, then goes where it needs to, then runs off the back edge. Much of Phil's day was spent micro-adjusting the tractor's position and the tilt of the mixer, and much of my day was spent frantically yelling, "STOP!" There are little grout pile stains all along where we went.

At one point, I was tantalized by the grout just hanging on the edge of the mixer but not quite falling, so I started to hoe it out. Until the hoe got caught by the mixer and started to fling around. No damage done, but I stopped that foolishness.

We had a few other mishaps. Phil tried a different tilt to the mixer, but that ended up spilling grout all over, so he had to switch it back (total time spent messing with that: about an hour). His jack failed while he was switching it back, and the mixer fell into an odd tight spot where he couldn't get purchase to lift it out. Then, right after that, he tried spraying into the mixer a little differently: rather than spraying the edge, which tended to splatter nastily, he sprayed the back. Which created a solid mass of compacted sand, covered by a layer of wet cement. This, incredibly, required hacking away at almost every square inch until the sand was loosened.

With these various frustrations, which made us both a bit grumpy, we only managed seven loads in six hours. Happily, that was enough to finish my minimum expected progress: two sides done. While we wait for the grout to harden over the next several days, we'll have time to do the other sides. The usual end of day progress photo doesn't show both the sides we finished.

The other corner shows both sides well, including the layer of water that rose at the end we finished last.

At the end of the day, we had to laugh: the cat and dog chased each other along the earliest grout. The dog left deep impressions, only mostly filled in, but the delicate tiny cat feet made us laugh. I thought it almost the visual embodiment of Carl Sandburg poem "Fog."

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.