Out third 12-hour day in five days

Today was our third 12-hour day in the last 5. C took off from work Wed-Fri - some vacation eh?

We decided to do another practice run with the concrete. Our first try was good, but not great. We thought we knew how to fix our errors, but thought it was a good idea to practice those fixes first and try to get a sample right before the "big pour."

We prepped out work area by cleaning up all the mess and debris from the prior pour and moved the slabs into the backyard. We vacuumed and put down fresh tarps, then cleaned and reassembled one of our molds. We also spent about an hour talking logistics - concrete is complicated, believe it or not! We have to arrange mixer(s) - if we get a small one it can fit in my car, but then we need two and have to do multiple batches. We're concerned that the first batch will set up before the last batch is done. If we get a big one, we need to rent a truck and tow it. We also have to arrange to have help - there is way too much concrete for two people to handle. It has to be worked into the mold with gloved hands and vibrated by tapping the mold with a hammer. Then it has to be troweled for about 3 hours. Today we were debating the merits of pouring in place (very messy in the kitchen) vs. building a mold in the backyard (makes large slabs to carry inside and the counter will have seams).

We made our requisite Home Depot run and picked up the mixer. We got home and began to run the mixer after creating the rebar reinforcement for the mold. We followed the advice of our do-it-yourself-concrete-countertop guru Fu-Tung Cheng (www.concreteexchange.com) and put the dry ingredients in first. Big mistake! Like making a cake, the dry ingredients caked hard onto the bottom of the mixer once we added the water. It wasn't actually mixing, the mixer was just rotating with a solid block at the bottom. We had to chip the material off the bottom of the mold with a shovel and added way more water than we should have. Next time we'll follow the advice on the mixer and add the water first!

The concrete took over 20 minutes to mix - this was a bad sign since it should have taken 8-12. But it was nice and wet compared to our too-dry mix of the previous try. It went easily into the mold and we worked it in and vibrated it. As we worked the concrete, we found out why you shouldn't add more than the recommended amount of water. In addition to making the concrete weaker, it takes forever to dry! We were toweling water off the top as it dried, and I finished troweling over 5 hours later at just after midnight. It should take about 3 1/2 hours to get to this point. (Follow up note: The concrete from this pour is still drying out on Tuesday morning). We also experimented with adding granite tile inlays. I had gotten these as samples, and we are hoping to add a large one in as a dough work surface, for decoration and for the "wow" factor. The inlays made the troweling more difficult, and we won't know for sure if we can use them until we can grind and polish and see if we got a nice flat surface with the inlay flush.

When we finally finished, I was completely exhausted!

Here is the slab after the final troweling is almost done. I think it looks pretty good! The edges are much better this time, and I learned a lot about troweling after doing it for 5 hours.

Here are the inlays we tried. We'll see how well they turn out after grinding and polishing!