Those pour countertops…

Technically speaking we did the counter top pouring yesterday, but since we were so far behind on keeping people updated on how the form work was going we decided to break it up into two posts.

We started mixing the Sakrete 5000 psi concrete right around 10 AM. Out plan had been to do mixes of 3 bags per run, but we found that this was just too much material to get a good mix in the drum.  We also discovered after the first mix that we needed to have all of our initial amount of water ready and mixed with color when we started. The first load was a pain to get mixed right since we added the water in 3 smaller batches as it was mixed wit the color.  Lessons learned.

Masks were necessary for putting the dry mix in. I did a good job of watching Peter load most of the bags

The mix. It only looks like a drum full of baby poop…

The process that we used to fill the forms was to put concrete in up to the rebar level in the form and then use a concrete vibrator that we rented to consolidate the material and try and minimize the voids and air pockets on the bottom of the form (top of the final counter).

Jessie was the mix master and handled the color additives and water levels in the mix

The concrete vibrator… insert your own joke here, goodness knows we did through out the day

Then once we were happy that the concrete was consolidated we filled the form the rest of the way up and hand packed it to consolidate it down. We could have use the vibrator again for this portion, but it was a huge pain to maneuver and splashed concrete all over the place so we limited its use to the bottom where it was more critical.

Once the form was filled we screeded the top of it to level the material out and pull off any excess. Then the top (bottom) of the counter was trowelled as smooth as possible. A couple of people have asked why we didn’t just do a poured in place countertop since it would have minimized the form work that was needed. If you could see how many lines I wound up leaving in the surface of the counter you would know why we went with an upside down cast system. Trowelling concrete is definitely something that needs experience.

Packing the form to the top

Screeding – Which is a word that no spell check seems to know

Trowelling the finish in, not a good job for someone with any OCD tendencies. Must… make… lines… go… AWAY!

After trowelling we cleaned off the form edges to help make breaking the forms as easy as possible. Finally once the concrete has started to setup we clipped the wires that were holding the rebar cages in place and smoothed out those holes in the concrete.

Overall it took us right around 3 hours of pretty continuous work to get everything poured, finished and our clean up done. It seemed almost a little anti-climactic compared to how many hours went into the prep work up front.  It was definitely a frantic feeling morning though since we were having to keep mixing while we were placing and finishing concrete, and you always thinking about the fact that the concrete is curing and you are kind of under the gun time wise. Still with my brother and his sons help it went pretty smooth. We’ll find out for sure on Wednesday when we break the forms.

Tay being helpful as always :)

The pour all done. Now we wait nervously for four days

There have also been a couple of questions about how we are going to get all of this concrete in place once it is finished. The short answer is brute force. We have 4 sections to put in place with the L shaped piece that goes into a corner being the most awkward. The others are just going to be heavy. The total counter is around 800 lbs so figure each section is around 200 lbs more or less. Its definitely going to take some man power so we will be calling in some favors and paying people off with beer and pizza I’m sure.

--Tom