Pour Circulation

We finally poured our driveway, and it could possibly be one of the best milestones yet. I can’t even begin to count the number of trips we have made hauling supplies up and down that driveway. It’s crazy to think that with the exception of the slab (where the concrete was delivered via a pump), every single material in that house was carried up the hill by hand. Considering that the driveway is 100 feet long with a vertical elevation change of fifteen feet, that’s a lot of hauling! Not to mention that the steep trek was often a muddy mess.

Before we could even consider pouring the concrete, there was a lot of prep work to do on the driveway and the front porch. We recently had our sewer and water lines installed so the torn up earth under our driveway didn’t have centuries of gravitational forces compacting it. We rented a jumping jack to compact the clay (the earth dropped down nearly 8 inches in spots!) and a small walk-behind skid steer to widen the driveway and level out the grade.

Reid using a jumping jack to pack down the loose earth and John using a standing skid steer to creating an even 15% grade

From there, we built forms around the driveway and porch and filled the space with gravel. Fortunately, we were able to utilize the skid steer for the bulk of the gravel hauling, instead of doing all the shoveling by hand. The final leveling was done by hand, but it was still a huge improvement.

We used a plate compacter on all of the gravel on the front porch and driveway, and a laser level to get it as even as possible

Shoveling gravel to even out the driveway

We then laid rebar across the entire span of the driveway and the porch, carefully bending it around the corners and twisting wire around nearly every single joint to hold it in place.

John laying rebar and working to get it to curve with the driveway

The view from an upstairs window, with all the rebar in place.

Believing that the hard work was over, we scheduled the pour; naturally, it wasn’t nearly as easy as we thought it would be.

We had to schedule three different parties and coordinating all of them at the same time was a challenge in itself. Each one provided their own set of problems:

1. The concrete itself

• The company has had trouble with people backing out at the last minute, so we had to wake up at 7:45 to confirm our order, even though we confirmed it the night before.
• They waited until the truck was loaded and ready to go before trying to charge our credit card. When our bank rejected the charge, they bumped us for one of their preferred customers.
• John struggled to get our bank to accept the charge because apparently orders over $5,000 require verification; he didn’t know my security questions and I was in a meeting at work, completely oblivious to what was going on. It would have been easy to simply break up the order into two charges (each less than 5k), but the concrete company refused.
• The charges finally went through after John aggressively informed the USAA agent that we were paying $4 per minute to have an entire work crew sit there and do nothing, and the concrete arrived 2 hours after the scheduled time.

2. A pump truck to distribute the concrete

• The only available pump truck was with a company that charged by the hour. We did the calculations and determined that it was costing us $2/minute, including all the time spent waiting for the concrete to arrive.
• Once the concrete finally arrived, it took more than 45 minutes to get the pump working. For some reason, he didn’t feel the need to verify its functionality during the 2 hours of waiting (and charging us).
• Only one guy showed up, even though three are required to operate the pump. Apparently we would have had to request more people, at a rate of $75 per hour, per person. In the end, John and Reid took on the task.
• The one guy who was sent out to operate the pump truck was inept. He poured a lot of concrete outside of the forms, took a long time, and even filled another worker’s boots with a gallon of concrete.

3. A team to do the finishing work

• We have worked with them in the past, and they previously had a team of six people doing the work. This time only three showed up, where one was new, and one was the 70 year old owner who doesn’t normally do the physical work.
• The new guy forgot to bring boots, so we had to run to the store and buy him a pair.
• They didn’t bring the gas powered concrete finisher – claiming that the skeleton crew could simply finish it by hand – so John had to drive the owner to his house to go get it.

The newly poured porch

A view of the finished driveway from an upstairs window

We spent the next few days removing the forms, which required some serious effort to get the stakes out. We cut the screws connecting the stakes to the forms, and then built a lever to pull them out. So much force was required that we broke the first lever arm (a 2×6 board) and the screws kept ripping out of the stakes. A few tweaks and we had a working machine.

The broken lever arm on the stake remover. I don’t know my own strength!

The new and improved stake remover

The bright side of the whole debacle is that despite the stressful pour, we have a driveway now.