completed slab

As promised, here is a photo of the completed slab, after the tarp was removed today. It rained most of the day, which is apparently great for the concrete, as it absorbs the water and gains strength faster than curing without extra water. Not much to do now until it is strong enough to support a few loads of bricks.

the slab has landed

The bakery now has a floor. And almost all the work we have done so far will never be seen again. A concrete finishing crew from Nanaimo came over today and poured the slab. It went amazingly quick, until they had to wait between passes with the power trowel. They weren't completely done until around 7pm. It does look pretty great though. It went from this:


To this:

This is after about 4 passes with the power trowel (sitting on the slab). They did about 6 or 7 all together. I'll post a tarpless slab pic tomorrow.

good to go

Quick post tonight. It's late, and I'm tired.

The engineer came by this morning and gave us the go ahead to pour the slab. We finished up preparing the foundation, then as a bonus converted our borrowed boat trailer into a slab hauling machine. A "slab" is an off-cut edge piece leftover from the log milling process. We are planning to collect slabs, cut them, and use them to fire the bake oven.

"S" minus 3 days and counting

I thought today would be a slow day. I was planning to do a bit of work on the trailer we are going to use for hauling firewood. The day soon turned into a busy one. Pay attention now, this gets confusing....

The slab is scheduled to be poured on Thursday. We still needed more sand. We need to place rebar on top of the finished sand. The engineer needs to inspect the rebar before the concrete is poured, but he can only make it tomorrow. In short, we need to have the rebar ready for inspection tomorrow morning, and we are still short of sand.

So we start getting rebar ready, and leveling the sand where we think there is enough. The sand arrives in the afternoon, and we work until almost 7pm finishing the rear of the bakery, so it is ready for inspection. We'll get an early start tomorrow, and hopefully have most of it finished before the engineer arrives.

The photo shows the bakery foundation, partially finished, with the sand packed and leveled, covered with vapor barrier, and with the reinforcing wire mesh on the plastic. As mentioned before, the depression in the rear middle is where the concrete slab has to be thicker to support the weight of the oven. The thickened slab is reinforced with a grid of 15mm rebar.