Concrete by hand!

It was 6AM and I heard the men outside my back bedroom wall...  They were conversing in somewhat quiet tones, but it was Spanish, and Loyce doesn't speak a word and nor does Biscuit, so the workers were outside.....

I got up and did those early morning necessary things, but went back to bed..  The talking stopped, and I went back to sleep...  Fast forward to about 7:30 and someone banged the outside of the wall on the bedroom rather hard....  And I looked out to find a fellow with a wheel barrow dumping concrete into the forms behind the patio....

What had transpired in the meantime was that a call was put out for the concrete truck that they couldn't get on Friday...   And things weren't any better on Monday morning either...  No truck today..  So our men regrouped and took their own truck over to the concrete plant and got a load of  sand and rock that they make concrete out of, and a stack of bags of cement.

Another fellow had gone after their big mixer and had backed it up behind the load of rock.   An industrial garden hose was stretched out from our house into the street and they were rapidly making their own concrete.

These guys don't like their picture taken very much and kind of indicated that to me the other day, so I will  build this picture with words..  Two men were spreading the concrete into the forms while a third was barrowing it from the mixer.  The shorter fellow that ran the trencher the other day was in the truck with a shovel filling the mixer with gravel and sand.  And breaking bags of concrete in half dumping them in as well.  The boss man was kind of standing there with the hose adding the correct amount of water to make the mix into the necessary slurry..

This really worked quite well as the mixing was delayed while they were finishing the patio, adding color and stamping the pattern into the surface...  But before long they were going all guns again screeding the sidewalk behind the garage...  It was finished with a broom finish and natural concrete color.

And almost in a flash it was 2PM and they were cleaning up to be gone for the day....  I went over and bought a big bag of burritos muchos grande at noon, and the fellows were quite happy for the food...  Good ole Del Taco came thru in a pinch.....

Loyce and I both left and started running errands for the rest of the afternoon, but at about 5 PM I noticed that our AC condensate drip was coming from the emergency pan under the AC unit and not from the pipe it is supposed to.........  Oh, oh...........!

So the next couple of hours was spent calling the HVAC folks and explaining to three different customer service ladies what my problem was......  Eventually the third lady called a foreman, and when I explained for the fourth time that water was coming from the emergency pan drain and not the inside of the AC like it should be,  he said we'll be right over..............!!

The service man arrived within about an hour and we climbed into the attic....  He took the covers off, and we found that the installation instructions booklet for the AC unit was still inside the plenum, soaked in water and washed against the drain opening.  That caused the drain to back up and run over into the emergency pan...

I had looked mid afternoon and we had the exact weather readings here that were recorded in KC..... 102 with a dew point of 60.... That means we were quite humid here after the rains yesterday...  That had caused the AC to put out a lot more condensate..... Which pointed out our problem...  Ah, new construction and the don't give a darn attitude!!

I will take more pictures once the bushes get dropped into their holes and some rock arrives, but it will probably have to be after the workers retire for the day....

The area had another dust storm during all of this, but it was well West of us out here in the East Valley..  But it is lightning outside tonight as I write this.......

This has turned into a book, so I'll quit for now...

Retired Rod