Sagebrush & Solar

Two back to back pour related pun titles in a row? Someone call the dad joke police!

The foreshadowing in the title ought to prepare you: the long awaited pour day did not go as planned. In fact, we’ll be saying “we hope to pour next week” once again in the (hopefully near) future.

Two themes were evident on pour day: Murphy’s Law and ‘it’s out of our control, so all we can do is go with it’.

Let’s rewind.

Keith’s dad, Harold, got into town on Monday afternoon; he went straight out to the build site to help Keith, my dad and my brother with tweaks, reinforcements, perforations, etc. There was lots of plywood and screws involved.

They went straight back out on Tuesday and worked past dark. The tone of the day was pure stress — they’d have to go back out early Wednesday morning for last minute finishing touches before the concrete crew arrived.

The pump truck arrived at 10. The pump truck has a long arm to siphon concrete into difficult to reach places, aka all of our walls.

The first concrete truck arrived — and got stuck. The second concrete truck arrived and helped get the first one unstuck. The first one then got stuck again.

All subsequent concrete trucks were turned away. Big wigs from the company arrived to figure out how to get it unstuck and to figure out whose fault it was. It was ultimately determined to be driver error. In an effort to lighten the load to get it unstuck, my dad ran single bucketfuls of concrete in his tractor to the pump truck. For every five bucketfuls, they were able to pump concrete for about a minute.

We decided to focus our efforts on the garage, knowing we would need to reschedule concrete trucks for another day after repairing the road.

Our biggest fear then came to life: a blowout. The short corners are the weakest points in the structure — and the corners by the garage door are short. Our southern corner blew out, causing a massive mess and a conundrum to fix it.

So, where are we at moving forward?

In order to pour the remainder of the garage and house, we have to fix the blown out garage corner. We then need to turn our efforts to the road, which was severely damaged by the cement truck. We will also need to reinforce any soft areas to avoid the same issue happening again. It’s been an extremely wet winter, and the ground is saturated. We laid a lot of pit run down last year, but it wasn’t enough for a 30 ton concrete truck.

We won’t sugarcoat it — we’re pretty bummed and down about this turn of events. My dad went above and beyond with reinforcements and bracing. We’ve poured our heart, soul, blood, sweat, tears and life savings into this project. This potentially puts us behind another month. This setback was outside of anyone’s control — but it still isn’t an easy pill to swallow. We are, however, very grateful to those who stepped up to help out.