It’s Saturday, and we’ve passed a major milestone. The base slab has now been poured and there’s no going back. Got up early today, ate a breakfast of Wheaties – breakfast of concrete champions – and got to it. I had purchased a very thick plastic bag that is sold as a way to mix concrete quickly and without mess. The initial plan was for me to be mixing one bag of Quikrete in the plastic bag while hubby mixed one or two bags of Quikrete in the wheelbarrow. We ended up doing all the mixing in the wheelbarrow one bag at a time. This wasn’t too bad because we ended up using only 14 bags of 60# Quikrete. Vaughn worked the hoe while I poured the water in a little at a time. Then we both shoveled it into place. I tamped and worked the concrete around the sides to try to make sure there wouldn’t be any voids.
Here in Georgia, the weather has been quite hot as you can imagine it being in August. I was concerned that the first batches of concrete would start setting up before we could mix the last bags, so we used ice water instead of water right out of the hose. I had saved a big batch of icecubes from the freezer (could have bought a bag of ice) and I put those in a plastic grocery bag and tied the top closed. I wanted cold water, not chunks of ice, in the concrete. The bag of ice went into a large cooler which I then filled with hose water. The cooler went on the tailgate of my truck and I siphoned off the water through a spigot on the cooler into some milk jugs that I used to measure the amount of water that went into each batch of concrete. No contractor would have gone to this much trouble, but hey, that’s why I wanted to do this myself.
Inside the slab I placed rebar along all four sides. After another layer of concrete, the welded wire mesh went in at approximately half the depth of the 6″ thick slab. After screeding the top and letting the bleed water subside, I started finishing with a metal float. I also went around the edges with an edger tool to round them off. Pretty good job for a girl!
