1 EAGLETON NOTES: Concreting: Day Four: Conclusion

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Friday 4 July 2014

Concreting: Day Four: Conclusion

The rain finished exactly at the time the Met Office had predicted late this morning and the blanket grey sky gave way to a mixture of blue and high cloud.  The rest of the weekend looks pretty dire so we uncovered yesterday's work to discover that the rain damage was minimal.  We set to work to do the final piece of the job which we had scheduled to be done when the rest was dry.  We decided that Molly had suffered enough being shut in the house and was unlikely to walk in the bit to be done today.

 Molly loves hoses!

She will do her best to 'catch' the water

Molly loves to know how things are done.

Job done

I still have to make a new flush manhole cover.  So hopefully from now on I'll not be tripping over the uneven surfaces and through puddles to get to the garden shed.  A job well done which I am sad to say I could no longer do alone.  Thanks to David and The Gazelle.

17 comments:

  1. It looks great! Of course one reason it turned out so well was that you had Molly to help you! :) xoxox

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    1. Absolutely DeeDee. What would one do without the moral support of man's best friend.

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  2. Congratulations to all four of you for a job well done :)

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  3. Impressive DIY sir - with a little help from your friends - but if I might be so bold - a little advice for all senior DIY fellows with dodgy knees. Whenever you have to do a job that involves kneeling down please protect your knees with a square of foam rubber. Our bony knees were not designed to support our weight on rock hard surfaces.

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    1. YP you are absolutely correct. What's more my usual work trousers have knee pad pockets and I have knee pads. Being rather silly (or too lazy) I didn't put them on for the little bit I had to do today.

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  4. A job well done indeed......even Molly approves.

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    1. Virginia I think Molly was just so pleased not to be shut in again.

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  5. Do it yourself jobs always seem to take a long time.

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  6. You would have done this ALL by yourself n the past, Graham?! I am impressed! Did you use some padding strapped to your knees when you were kneeling down there? I've seen such knee-pads in garden centers and think they are a good idea. If I could be sure of my Dad using them, I'd give them a pair for Christmas, but he is a "no fuss" man and more often than not shuns everything we come up with to make life a bit more comfortable for him.

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    1. Meike I was silly yesterday. I have a pair of knee pads and when I have my 'proper' work trousers on they fit into special pockets. I should have been wearing them but the last wee bit it was a relatively small job and I just didn't get around to putting them on.

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    2. Sorry Meike I got distracted when I was replying and forgot to answer the first part of your comment. Yes. I have done plenty of concreting on my own in the past. The problem is that it's hard work and takes a long time so ideally even relatively small jobs are better tackled with two people: one to make the concrete and one to lay it. In this case all the materials were at the top of my plot and the concreting at the bottom so the 1½ tons of materials had to be barrowed down the path which has a considerable slope on it.

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  7. If you ever look at the photos of the Monastery on my blog, it might impress you to know that the entire building is of concrete and the monks did all the work by hand, with no machines.
    They have an example of a wheelbarrow filled with bricks that you can pick up and it shows how heavy it would have been to have done this job.

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    1. Kay when one looks at the incredible feats of human strength and endurance that were involved in so many building projects of centuries past it should make us realise just how fortunate we are with today's labour saving devices and machinery. When I did the landscaping of my garden I moved many hundreds of tons of soil and rocks and stones in order to shape it and clear it but I did it over the best part of ten years (of course I had a full-time job). Anyone moving building materials in the past would probably have moved a ton with every 20 barrow loads - perhaps fewer.

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  8. Job well done GB and crew!!

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    1. Thanks Carol. Now for the next project...... Unfortunately the crew left at 0530 this morning.

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