Shovelling it in ...

A beautiful sunny morning (and sunshine all day), so obviously the right thing to do is to lay some concrete.

So first thing this morning (OK, ten o'clock) down to Chausson to get 720kg of sand and 6 bags of cement. Saw a pair of red kites over the upper Cele valley on the way down (the newspaper reports that the annual count of kites in the Cantal shows numbers significantly reduced in the last two years).

I then spent the next few hours shovelling the gravel and sand and cement into the mixer and tipping it direct into the formwork outside the (future) bedroom window. At lunchtime, having used up all the cement, wolfed down the remains of yesterday's dinner, and back down to Chausson for another 6 bags. Used three of these and finished the slab - a total of about 2.4 tonnes of dry materials, and probably another 0.1t of water - about two and a half tonnes of concrete (somewhere between 1 and 1.5 cubic meters?).

When it was all down, and we were about to sit down for a cup of tea, I noticed that the long board with the heaviest weight of concrete on it had bowed by about 3 or 4 centimeters in the middle. After cursing for a few minutes, I found a concrete block, wedged it against the middle of the shuttering, and used a sledgehammer to drive a thick piece of wood between the block and the shuttering. Surpisingly this worked, and the shuttering is now straight again.

Since finishing the concrete and the tea, I've been spending the last half-hour going out to admire it at five minute intervals, telling myself that I'm making sure that the neighbour's dogs don't walk over it (as I am sure they will). Later on, if there's a reasonably dry surface, I'll try to cover it over with sacking as the weather forecast is freezing temperatures overnight.

What does it look like? Pretty much like concrete, unfortunately.