Throughout history, mankind's attempts to pursue greater things have frequently met with adversity.
To this can be added LDR's latest attempt at concreting. It started off just fine and dandy, everything ready to go, my brother-in-law on hand to help out (seriously the bloke's a legend and i owe him BIG TIME) and when the truck turned up we were full of optimism.
As the house floor got covered the scale of the task became apparent but it was still fine, just need to up the intensity.
And then, with the house chockers, the bad news started. There was still another 1.5 cubic metres of concrete in the truck and it needed to go somewhere not in the truck. Given we had taken extremely careful measurements and had 3 or 4 different companies work out the quantities from them, we have no idea how it could have gone so wrong but, well, shit happens. Leaving my brother-in-law (who had never done any concreting before) to do what he could inside, i made a snap decision to lay a 15 metre long concrete apron between the house and driveway. It actually ended up looking kind of ok but it took a long time and a huge amount of energy to do it.
And while that was happening, the concrete inside the house wasn't just sitting there waiting patiently was it?
My mother has since described it as "the most demoralizing thing i've ever seen". It was utter torture, as i worked myself into near hysterics desperately trying to salvage what i could. About half of what you see in the photo above got to a barely tolerable state, the rest was completely beyond hope.
In the end i resorted to just removing as much of the almost set concrete as possible to reduce the amount of grinding/jackhammering that would be required, the consequence of which is that 2 days later i can't take a full breath because all the muscles in my upper body are so sore.
So that sucked.
On the plus side, the chap who will be undertaking the rebuilding has had a look at the disaster area and is confident of getting things where they need to be, so as much as i would like to never take part in concreting ever again, i will be doing just that next thursday.
My luck didn't improve much though, as the next morning Mrs LDR and i were woken by a crashing sound from the living room, which turned out to be the kittens knocking over my mid-rebuild Shiv. Which hit the coffee table. On which was MRS LDR's Special Cup.
Run for the hills!
Fair Winds,
LDR.