Eventful

My beautiful Mom

The first bit of cement coming out of the truck

That's the word... eventful.  It's been an eventful couple of weeks since I've written.

The slab was poured for the house yesterday.  We had 3 cement trucks and about 9 guys working.  Things move quickly.  Chuck told me he had everything scheduled to start at 6:30 yesterday morning, since it was going to be a hot day.  I showed up at 6:30, and everyone else beat me to it.  Les had to work in New Mexico yesterday, so he didn't see the action until later.

The guys smoothing the cement.

It took about 3 hours to pour all of the concrete we needed to fill that big, huge hole.  But first, we need to go back to last week.  Les and I left for Iowa for a birthday party for my Mom's 90th birthday.  7 of her 8 kids showed up, as well as sisters, nieces, grand kids, etc.  We all converged onto Ames Iowa for a shindig.  So while Les and I were driving the 900 miles to Iowa on Friday, Chuck had sand, gravel, moisture barrier, radon system and the insulation installed in the big, giant hole.  That made it not quite so big and giant anymore.  Les and I returned on Monday, then concrete was poured Wednesday.

Doggy footprints

Now... and this is the way my mind works.  We've spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get us to this point, but I wanted some "character" in the slab.  We intend to stain the slab and just live on that... thus, the insulation and the extra materials in it.  I figure that we can stain and seal the slab, and concrete stain is absolutely gorgeous when it's done right.  And... down the road if we don't want to live on the concrete anymore, we can just tile over it.  Simple beans.

So for this "character" that I wanted, I had to wait until the concrete was dry enough to walk on, but still wet enough to take some playfulness.  I asked the girls to walk around on the cement.  They did.  I now have doggy footprints in our floor.

More Doggy Footprints

Then, I picked some grasses and flowers, and spread them onto the concrete.  We now will forever more have pretty little patterns here and there on our floor.  I couldn't be happier with the result.  The sunflowers didn't do what I had hoped, in fact they made a mess.  But, nothing ventured nothing gained.

Then I washed the girls' feet and headed on home.  I'm so thrilled with my new home!  It's coming along so quickly now.

After curing 1 day

Grasses

Paw Prints