Concrete Progress

Today, I went up to the property to accept delivery of a new electric golf cart. We had one at the old house, and we used it to transport the bins up the hill to the street every week, as well as for carting stuff around between the outbuildings. It had a towing attachment, which I used to haul the wood chipper around while doing landscape maintenance. It was a good cart.

I guess you won’t be surprised to hear that the dealer screwed up and, even though I’d been told to accept delivery today between 9 and 10 in the morning, no delivery happened. Of course the sales guy wanted to tell me stories about staff being out and all, but honestly — I’ve worked with enough salesmen to know not to invest any amount of energy into caring about anything they say to even come to the question of truth. Whatever. As it happens, there’s not actually anyplace to store the cart at the moment, anyhow.

See, ultimately, it’s going to be in a garage with an outlet, since it’s an electric cart. But for now, we’re going to put a shed up at more-or-less the site of the old toxic waste shed. I had a conversation with the builder a month ago and he assured me that it’d be no problem to pour a level concrete pad on which I could assemble the shed; he’d do it along with the concrete for the ADU foundation. So, they’ve poured concrete into the holes they dug for the ADU foundation piers, and now the steel rebar is well set in concrete. Gotta let that cure a bit, I suppose, before pouring the actual foundation slab.

Of course, the thing I wanted to look at was the slab for the shed. Not that I could have done anything about it today — since deciding on which shed to get and specifying the pad dimensions, the shed is out of stock. Can’t order it until it’s back in stock, which the store guesses ought to be next week sometime. Maybe. But, you know, it’d do my heart good to see a nice flat slab of concrete, on which I could park my shiny new cart.

Truly, a morning to remember. To be fair, the girders on the right are kind of necessary, since the ground there is really soft and if we didn’t put some kind of pier down, then the next decent rain that came along would tilt the slab. So, it doesn’t look like much mostly because this is the bit that’s going to be under the slab.

But the guys were working hard, digging up boulders and stumps from behind the retaining wall. They’re infilling that bit, and the soil engineer was coming up to watch that process. The last time we were up there, Lise observed that this is an impressive retaining wall — it’s almost a ha-ha.

The way the wall is constructed is, there are these black (painted) steel girders sunk into the ground (20 feet, mostly) and then pressure-treated wood planks are inserted into the gap in the girders to connect them. The upslope side is then lined with what looks like weed-block fabric and then there’s gravel poured in. Finally, the space behind the wall is filled in with rubble and dirt, of which we have a great plentitude.