Holy crap! We managed to shift, mix, and pour 36, 80 pound bags of QuikCrete over the last three days.
Saturday dawned early for us. We had to do some early morning shopping and then headed North to exchange Teresa's car for her sister's pickup truck. Then on to her dad's place where we got a large mortar box, some cement hoes, and a couple of short handled shovels. Then to Lowes to pick up two 94 pound bags of Portland cement. Turns out one bag would have done fine. But we were fresh and stupid and hauling one more excruciatingly heavy item up four flights of steps wasn't as daunting at the time. We then headed home, re-strung the lines for our deck layout, and got to work. We made the serious mistake of trying to mix five bags of cement at once. Just about killed us. We had considered borrowing a small mixer from Breeze, another contributor to this list, but thought it would take a while to go get it, bring it back, and then somehow manhandle it up all the damn stairs. We ended up pouring just the one footer on Saturday. It took seven bags of QuikCrete and some large rocks and chunks of cement that we had soaked thoroughly. We then cleaned up and cooked up some Copper river salmon we had picked up earlier in the day. DAMN! that is some awesome salmon. We got another early start on Sunday. We mixed batches of two or three bags at a time. It is amazingly hard work. Teresa was right in there with me and did a lot better at mixing than I could have done myself. We poured two more footers by noon. At that point, I was pretty beat. I took a break, then we had to go to Lowes and pick up four more bags of QuikCrete, some gravel, and a couple more Sono Tubes. After lugging all that up the damn stairs, we cleaned ourselves up and headed out to a fund raiser BBq for Blind and Vision Rehab Services of Pittsburgh. Here is a stupid gotcha. One of the footers took a bit more cement. When we were finished with the seventh bag, we still had a few more inches to fill. I ended up scooping a bunch of wet cement back out of the hole, then took a rather large chunk of rubble and stuffed it down into the wet cement and filled the form to the top. Ah, perfect. Hey, hand me that J bolt. Sometimes plans don't work out quite as you envisioned them. The J bolt stopped going down about two inches before I needed it to stop. It bumped against that nice big chunk of rubble. I stuffed my arm down into the cement and tried pushing the rubble further down. Yeah right, cute of me wasn't it? So after scooping wet cement out, yet again, and then damn near herniating myself trying to pull that chunk out of the cement. We mixed up half a bag of cement and filled the hole. We both called off work for Monday because we just wanted this job done. We didn't start quite as early, but we were in the yard by 9:30 and mixing. One more footer went by pretty quickly, but then we hit a slight snag. The fifth hole was not located exactly where it was supposed to be. So some work with shovel and post hole digger and we widened up the hole a bit so that we could locate the sono tube in the right place. More mixing and pouring and the footers were done. It turns out that most of our cement that had over-wintered under our back stairs seemed fine. No hard lumps, no clumpiness. Three bags were total losses, 80 pound rocks in a bag. Three bags were half rock and half dry. We didn't use those. We did throw in an extra shovel full of Portland cement in with each bag of the old cement just to be on the safe side. After all was said and done, and we lowered a string line to just above the J bolts, three of the four bolts along the one side of the future deck were right in the middle. One bolt was about 3/4 inch out, but we can adjust for that. The fifth bolt which is out at the end of our ledger board which extends beyond the edge of the house, we believe is in the right place within tolerance, but we won't really know for sure until the ledger board is fully bolted in place. It looks dead on at the moment but I can imagine things torquing a bit. Anyway, the heavy lifting work is done for the moment. There will be some more cement work to do the stairs but that can come later after the deck itself is complete. I'll tell you what, those 80 pound bags of cement are freakin heavy. Trying to pull them out from under the stairs, lift them, gently step around all the crap in the yard and not trip was quite the challenge. After we finished with the last hole, I was faced with the option of having to lift and move the 80 pound rocks-in-a-bag. I opted for the alternative. I sledged them into gravel and fist sized chunks and then made the chunks disappear over the fence. The gravel and dust just got kicked around the yard a bit. It was like 85 degrees F, 29 C, and sunny sunny sunny yesterday. I sucked down a gallon of Gator Aid and it was pouring out of my skin as fast as I was drinking it down. What a job. I am that much closer though to sitting on my deck, beer in hand, reveling in the work being done and thinking of my next insane project. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (412) 268-9081
