Well, we did it… sort of.
After weeks of preparation we finally had the concrete poured to level the first floor, create the pillars, and fill in the walls.
It was extremely difficult to do this with just C and I. The plan was that he would be directing the concrete on the top while I stayed at the bottom to alert him if anything went wrong. About 5 minutes in something went wrong. The support at the bottom of the form for the walls gave out and started to bow out. We stopped the concrete from pouring and put up plastic to keep the concrete from pouring down the wall forms. I then moved to the top to help C move the concrete. We used buckets to start filling the pillars. About 10 buckets in the form failed ad busted open. So we stopped filling those forms.
We finished off leveling the top of the first floor and then used the rest of the concrete to fill in a part of the driveway that needed to be leveled.
We are extremely disappointed in this concrete pour.
After the truck left we proceeded to fix the wall by chipping away the excess and using that to fill in the dips in the floor.
Then we removed one side of the pillar form and chipped away the excess before reforming it. After much deliberation it has been decided that we can buy more concrete bags and slowest fill the forms ourselves. If we add about 5 bags at a time and let them harden (even partially) we won’t have the pressure from mass amounts of concrete causing the forms to bow out and fail. With the walls we are going to go back to our initial plan of filling 1-2 foot sections at a time.
Here is a picture of our only success of the day
