Concrete Christmas week

Way late posting this, but in the days before Christmas I managed to mix up and pour the sills for each of the four door openings.

Side door after the pour.

Back door after it's pour. 

Garage door sills poured and floated. Saved these guys for last after I got my technique down on the smaller doors. 

Left Garage door after curing a few days and the forms stripped off.

Right door as well.

Side door. For all the doors I left a 2" foam buffer between the slab and the sill on all the doors. The top piece is 1" foam, and below it is Fox blocks.

Back door with the forms stripped.

Tree Work

We had six very large Eastern White Pines on the property ranging in age from 60 to 100 years old. One was a scrappy pasture pine with no real usable logs in it, but the others generated a number of logs suitable for the sawmill.

I had my brother in law - Ed Pike of Ed Pike's tree service drop all the trees for me, and chip up all the smaller stuff. We used the chips to mulch the hill that had been regraded, and cover some of the other exposed gravel and dirt around the building site to cut down the mud.

Ed dropping one of the pines in a cluster.

Ed topping some of the remaining trees before dropping them. We chipped this stuff straight onto the bank we had regraded. 

 Susan's nephew Blake tackling the big, 104 year old pine.

Break time after dropping that bad boy.

30 logs ready for me to bring up the saw mill.

Got Slab

I had Glenn Sherman from Crow Hill Concrete do the slab pour and finishing for me. They set lines on the walls and set pins in the middle of the floor, and basically eyeballed the pour to get the concrete at the level they wanted.

Here they are working the first corner of the slab, bringing it up to the level marks on the wall. 

After the first truck's worth of concrete they had just about half the slab poured. The rear is thicker, since we slope about 3/4 of an inch per 10' on the front 20' of the slab.

Slab setting up after screed and bull float.

Glenn making one of four or five passes with the power trowel.

Two days later, and the saw cuts for the control joints are in.