Pouring Concrete

Pouring concrete was fun, we hired a pumping truck because we can't get cement trucks onto the site. It costs about £200 to hire the truck for an afternoon but it made life really easy. There is 4 inch hose of liquid concrete coming out of the sky and you can put the concrete just where you want it. The man with the truck used two joysticks to position his hydraulic arm.

The concrete was more liquid than I expected, the consistency of runny porridge. It flowed around the trenches and mostly found it's own level, needing only a bit of raking at the end to coax it into the corners. Using an improvised piece of wood with two handles to tamp the surface to a smooth finish was the only job that require two people.

The trenches were filled to a depth of 70cm with concrete, two and a half truck loads of ReadyMix (a total of 15m³) it cost about £800. The Readymix company wanted payment by credit card, presumably so you can't change your mind once they've started mixing it.
In a couple of hours it was already hardening, we know this because when we got back from the pub there were a set a cat's footprints across the surface !

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