Scraping the barrel

The Chausson lorry arrived on Friday with seven and a half cubic metres of concrete on board - according to the delivery note that was 17.6 tonnes. I'm not sure we really scraped out the inside, but there wasn't a lot still inside when it left. 

We started pouring it into the centre section of the hangar:



At first it was possible to drag the concrete back towards the other end of the hangar with a rake and a shovel -



and of course with a lot of Gary's help too. After pouring in a certain quantity down the sides of the pit, we struggled to get the reinforcing grille into place:



Once it was there we kept tripping over it or catching it with the end of the rake, and eventually we ended up using the wheelbarrows to get the last of the cement to the back. But the next day it had all set and looked pretty good:



There's something of a slope down from the pit to the right at the back: a combination of wanting to get the edge of the pit as level as possible, and not having had quite enough concrete the last time to get the level there as high as it should have been. But concrete's not cheap: these two loads came to a touch over €2,000.

We also struggled to set in the drain at the front of the hangar, and in the end we found that we were short of just a tiny bit of concrete - if we'd had the drain a little closer in we'd have had enough. So there's a small area on the left that will have to be done later..



The last picture shows a small amount of the shuttering removed, with the wooden bar at the top keeping a space for the planks that will eventually go over the top when the pit is not in use. The electricity conduit just shows, too: we'll eventually have lights and a socket for power tools inside the pit.



On Tuesday I'll get some more sand and cement and try to finish off the last parts of the floor - weather permitting, anyway.