It's happening today! We are getting the middle bay of our gigantic shed concreted. When we signed off on the quote I assumed it would be done later in winter, in that it would be an ideal a rainy winter's day concreting job as it was almost entirely inside, but the concreter said that wasn't it. Cold winter's days inside take longer to finish. In the end it was simply a queuing process calibrated by the usual tradie's complicated balancing act of job size, location, other jobs etc. (And we pay our bills promptly....always a good way to get a job prioritized in a busy queue.)

But as it turns out, its a filthy cold rainy day! My poor old road has taken a beating. Five utes going back and forth, a small tracked digger shifting some 30 metres of crushed rock to level the site, two trucks that the concreting team use and then the huge concrete pumping truck and the cement mixers. My road gets a bit bashed up when its very wet, but big trucks churn it a lot, their sheer weight gouging tracks in the normally good gravelled road. It'll take me awhile to restore it, and I won't make much progress on that while its still so wet.

The other unexpected thing with this job was the wild weather caused a power outage....fallen tree, powerline...the usual country outage. The middle bay only has one (big) outside door, a roller door on the north side. It lets light in, but not enough on a miserable grey day. The concreters had set up floodlights for the job, but as soon as the pour started the power went off and the floodlights went with it. Five minutes looking at the fusebox, then checking with the power company, to work out it was an outage offsite rather than something at fault on our property. No ETA on resumption of power supply, so we dragged my little-used generator out of its far corner in the shed and the lights have been running on generated power.

To be ready for the job I needed to empty the shed. Because it’s a big space its absorbed a LOT of stuff in the ten years we've been here.

A mix of essential tools, things that might come in handy, and stuff that can only be called farm junk. Racks of timber, 20kg bags of lime (so many!), steel, corrugated iron sheets, big reels of wire and pipe, four bicycles, boxes and boxes of plumbing fittings….Its taken me weeks to empty it all out. I did cover it all, but wild winds and crappy biodegradeable(!) builders plastic have left the stuff exposed to rain. I've given up. I'll re-sort it when its all over. In emptying it out I had culled a lot of stuff, and I will be culling again when I decide how and what to put back.

The shed was built on a sloping gradient, which means the middle bay has a 10-20 cm gap at the floor level. The concreter had a solution which I am happy with, which was to scaffold to the wall from the outside, meaning the ground-to-wall space will be filled in but to do that he needed all the walls to be clear on both sides. Along one wall I had 20 x 6 metre slabs of thick-sliced redgum stacked. They've been there forever. We had a massive redgum come down, got it all sliced up by someone with a mobile timber-mill…stacked it in the shed….and its been there since. But it all had to be moved for the concreting.

Oh dear. I am adept at incrementally moving large, heavy objects by myself, but that one nearly defeated me. In the end it was leverage and incremental moves, as usual, but it was hard going. When the concreters are finished I'll need to deal with the slabs again....not looking forward to it.

I also wanted to get some pipes in the ground prior to putting down the slab. One day I might want to have water on the other side of the shed, so it makes sense to put the pipes in now. The shed floor was hardpacked clay, hasn't seen rain for 15 years. Chipping it out was like breaking and shoveling rock, and I found the most I could do was an hour's work before I had to go and do something else. Anyway, its done now.

Once the concrete has cured we will have a massive, clean, airy workspace. Clean as in not as much dust as we used to get blowing under the walls, but also clean in that it will be a sweepable concrete floor. We'll need to get some lights installed.

Almost ready...!

Mesh is down

Huge concrete pump towers over our very high shed

Currently the more valuable stuff has been moved into the front bay. Power tools, blades etc. But tightly packed in crates, the crates in warehouse racks, so when something goes wrong, like the plumbing problem a couple of weeks ago, I spend more time going through the crates looking for the right tools and components than doing the actual job itself.

Anyway, they finish polishing it this afternoon, back tomorrow to put in some cracking-prevention saw cuts. A week to cure enough and then we can start using it. I can't wait.....!

Finished. Needs a week to harden before we start dragging heavy stuff around. Interesting to see it is drying fastest along the saw cut lines.