Concrete and mortar
I was remarking on my ageing hands the other day, well it’s not just them that’s suffering. Picture my rather unruly hair now, it’s got rather long and money and time being in short supply my hair is in rather excessive supply. I noticed too the other day that my forearms were getting rather littered with scratches and bruises, basically by the end of a day working under the floors the soil has so embedded in my locks that I end up looking like a self-harming Don King.
Anyway another weekend and only a bit of time to work as I was lined up to be a taxi driver and babysitter on the Saturday evening. Not what I wanted to do but it was great to see Izzi for more than my customary day over the two days, I was secretly pleased 🙂
Shockingly little achieved though, first I had a Friday evening that was scotched when I lost my tape rule. Not what one would think was a disaster but it finished my evening of work pretty prematurely. Normally I’d have had a spare to hand but that went to the great landfill in the sky when it refused to rewind the other week. I think I spent an hour looking for it, found it in minutes the next day neatly tucked under the floor, I reckon I must have been subconsciously avoiding work. I did manage to get a section of floor fitted though, another bit that involved fitting a section from above and tightening it into place with bolts, big bolts this time, I’d bought some bigger battens too so it was all a bit more industrial this time around.
Found a hole too, nothing too worrying but a hole no less, first of all I attempted filling it with expanding foam but then when I realised a full can of foam hadn’t filled it up I decided to remove some stones and investigate further. Stones removed and there’s a rather large expanse in the middle of my foundations, not good but not too tricky to fix. Anyway it’s always good to find these problems so that they can be put right. So a trip to B&Q and I found myself the owner or a large bag of foundation 40 newton rated concrete. After cutting out the foam I then mixed the concrete up and then squashed it into the gap, a rather worrying exercise as it involved my reaching into the hole, a hole with a whole house perched on top of it. The concrete was fantastic, rock hard in an hour, however I didn’t have enough and I had to purchase another bag to top it all out.
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Actually the trip out to buy the second bag was more fraught than I would have expected, I’m not a builder and I don’t look like a builder, even with my wayward hair fastened down under a woolly hat and my finest dirty overalls on I still couldn’t pass for the genuine article. B&Q were out of 40 newton concrete in Bishop Auckland, so I knew I had to venture to the lofty heights of builderdom and head for Jewsons and Travis Perkins. Even in my bestest overalls, sporting liberal amounts of dust they saw straight through me. I tried to get into the vernacular but this was met by: “What do you mean by readymix? What with water too?”, “I can deliver a ton on Monday” fully knowing I only needed a small sack, “We don’t grade our concrete, are you sure that’s what you want?”. I even tried to sell a story about “the house I was working on at the moment” as though there were many more, I think they knew instantly that lurking under my Kvaerner overalls there was a rather embarrassed flanneller, talking out of his blue cotton boiler-suited behind.
Anyway I managed to get the correct bag in B&Q that Sunday morning, Izzi and I tripping in through the Trade entrance in our civvies, Izzi perched on a palette truck with a handful of the builders tutting at out flagrant disregard for palette truck health and safety. I no longer cared, I dumped the sack of concrete on the truck, Izzi sat on it, Izzi got all dusty and I whipped out my Trade card at the Trade checkout and I felt liberated and Izzi enjoyed it too, all with my mad hair blowing in the wind.
So not a job I’d planned on doing, a setback in my weekend work but a rather worthy job done.
The next job was levelling out the floor, I’d previously mentioned that it was a little out of kilter and I’d had to make slate stacks to raise the level, well I still had a few more to do. In the past I’d used Cementone from Screwfix to fix these stacks into position, this was brilliant, rock hard in twenty minutes, really easy to use, but pretty expensive at a tenner for a 5 kilo tub. Anyway while buying the concrete I bought a cheaper alternative, Tarmac 25 kg pre-mix mortar
“Made by experts for professionals”.
Instantly on mixing up I noticed a difference, it was very sandy, in fact incredibly sandy. I applied it liberally to my stacks and hey presto it just sat there like a pile of damp sand. Two hours later and falling behind schedule it was still wet, six hours later it was damp and crumbly and ten hours later I had to give up as I had to go out. Flipping bleeding awful stuff, I’ll never use it again, I will try out a spade of cement mixed into it but that doesn’t help then it gets thrown in the tip.
“Made by accountants for gullible DIY’ers”
Next day it had gone off, so I went off to Screwfix and bought a tub of Cementone then spent Monday evening doing remedial work on the stacks, all work that should have been done that Saturday.