Phase One Pour

Project Sidewalk Phase One is complete. Friday at O-Dark-Thirty, the cement truck pulled into the driveway. It was supposed to arrive around 6:30, but decided to show up a little earlier at 6:10. We turned on all of the outdoor lighting and still we were a bit light challenged for the task at hand.

Just as the cement truck is backing up I feel the first raindrop..."@#&*%" I think to myself...still the pour must go on. There are a few more raindrops as the first of the cement is off-loaded into the wheelbarrow. No turning back now...

Load after load of cement is poured into place; we work it with shovels and rakes to make sure it gets into each corner evenly. Mercifully the few raindrops begin to taper off. Thank You God! The pouring is done, now comes the real work...we have to take a screed board and level out the cement. With one person on each end of the board, we use a sawing back and forth action to work the slurry. You can see the screed board in the above picture. We also use trowels to smooth the surface...as we do this the cats decide it would be a good time to walk across the cement, then run across it and even lay on it.

We imprinted palm fronds onto the drying cement; a few cat prints just adds to the "nature trail" feel of the sidewalk.

We are done working the cement in just over two hours. We let the cement cure for one day before we took the form boards off. Once that was done we were able to finish putting down the river rock and stepping tiles. We are very pleased with the outcome of Phase One of Project Sidewalk.

Phase Two will start next week...weather permitting.