Making It Concrete
If necessity is the mother of invention, what kind of parent is YouTube? Perhaps, the father of overconfident projects. It’s amazing how time-lapse photography can take all the effort out of a complex, taxing, and difficult enterprise. How many times will we utter those fatal words, “I could do that,” before we learn? Until then, our fate is sealed.
This story starts like a fairy tale. Three brothers went to the house of a neighbor who had decided to downsize his considerable tool collection. Many nice tools were rolled into a super fantastic deal. However, the purchase of so many fine tools started a sequential vortex of events that went like this.
“Wow! Look at all these great tools!”
“Yeah, where are we going to put them?”
“We can put them in our shop.”
“Yes, but our shop only has a dirt floor. You can’t put nice tools like this on a dirt floor, can you?
“I guess you’re right, but lo and behold one of our nice new tools is a concrete mixer.
“So?”
“With a cement mixer like that, we can pour a concrete floor in our shop. Then we’ll have a nice place to put all our fine tools.”
“Are you sure? That seems like an awful lot of work just to store some tools.”
“Naw, I watched a YoutTube video about it. It’ll be a snap.”
“Are you even sure that the old cement mixer we just bought still works?”
“It probably does. Let’s order twenty-five pallets of pre-mix cement and find out.”
We changed the names of people in the foregoing conversation to protect the innocent—or at least the gullible. And we soon had pallets and pallets (and pallets) of pre-mix cement on the way from a local supplier. There was no going back. A cement floor was going to happen just like it did on YouTube. Well, just like YouTube except for the timelapse. I blame the cement mixer. It was a little older version, (okay a lot older) and did not have a time-lapse setting. In fact, it didn’t have any settings at all. The first time we turned it on, it just hummed ominously and blew out the breaker.
Not to despair, after only a few more blown breakers we learned that plugging it in, followed by a mad thirty-foot dash along the power cord to spin the flywheel as the prehistoric electric motor hummed ominously was all that was needed to get the vintage cement mixer working perfectly. To cut down on the challenge and in recognition of our impending dotage, we installed an on/off switch on the front of the beast. We wondered why nobody had done that earlier because a quick flip of the switch and a little flick of the flywheel sent it on its merry way quite reliably. But as I mentioned it did greatly lessen the challenge of using it.
With a working cement mixer, we were ready to make some concrete, right? Well, not quite. There was this thing about transporting the pallets with bags of cement from the supplier to our construction site. Physics is a bitch! Each pallet weighed more than one and a half tons. The lumber yard forklift easily lifted the pallets onto the back of the truck. But when the truck arrived at our worksite, the forklift was still back at the lumber yard. And no matter how intently we stared at them, the pallets stayed on the truck. It looked like the only option was to manually unload them. Fortunately, it didn’t actually come to that. Our antique John Deere tractor, the only piece of equipment older than the cement mixer, had a scoop attached to the lift. So, fifteen bags at a time we let old JD move the cement from the truck to where we wanted the pallets placed on the worksite. With the first truckload, we moved four and a half tons of premix. What an amazing sense of accomplishment. There were only about thirty more tons still to go. YouTube was right. This was going to be a snap. Now, where was that timelapse setting?
It was interesting to discover how much physical effort is masked behind YouTube time-lapse photography. As we dumped our first load of cement out of the mixer into the wheelbarrow, we exalted in the success of actually having made concrete. When we poured the slimy, gritty mass into the first form it brought to mind the neighbor’s dog violating a corner of the front walk. This process was going to be like filling a bathtub with a squirt gun. But soon we fell into the rhythm of the thing. Three bags of premix thumped down on a makeshift table we built beside the mixer. Three bags were slit open with a box cutter. Three bags were lifted and poured into the maw. Then the hose filled the bucket to both measure water for the next batch and to time the mixing of the current three bags. Then humming the tune to “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, the results were turned out into a waiting wheelbarrow for the trip to the far end of the form. “One for my master, one for my dame, and one for the little boy. . . “ Oh, never mind.
Oddly enough, time-lapse can be replaced by an exhausted stupor, and soon the forms were filled with somewhat uniquely shaped concrete. It’s amazing the way hardened cement can hold the shape in which it was left to cure. Some makers of concrete floors pride themselves on the smooth uniform surfaces they leave behind. In truth, that kind of floor can actually be a health hazard without adequate friction for safe standing and walking. We carefully avoided this by pouring our garage floor in uniquely random patches of concrete. We fully achieved a safe level of traction on the floor and developed an interesting aesthetic that might best be described as a quilted cement floor.
Now there will be some who may question our choice of methodology, not to mention our sanity, for making a concrete floor this way. In our defense, I would offer the explanation that the poor old cement mixer was just sitting there begging to be used. Additionally, the guy on the YouTube video said we’d save a lot of money doing it this way. And I have the spreadsheet to prove it. Especially when I subtracted the cost of the high-class health club required to provide that level of exercise from the total. And finally, we have the satisfaction and humiliation of knowing that we did it ourselves. What more can one ask for?