4. Pouring Our First Concrete Slab (NO EXPERIENCE) | Unexpected Result
We finished the concrete slab, polished hand finish, with no experience and all by ourselves. We worked until 4am and now we have got a concrete floor. Fourth week building our Off Grid Workshop.
How to pour a concrete slab "recipe". After tons of research and dozens of hours watching others do it, these are the steps we followed:
1. Pour the concrete in the middle of the form, and fill the first half (ours was too wet, and ended up filling the whole thing)
2. Eugenia had to mag the edges, making them flat and horizontal, while I kept extending the concrete with the rake.
3. Once the whole thing was filled up and Eugenia finished the edges we needed to screed the whole thing, based on the top of the form and the level Eugenia made with the hand float. To make it all level and flat.
4. Right after screeding, with the slab leveled and horizontal, still very wet, do not wait to do this, we then passed the magnesium bull float. Ideally in both directions. We could only go in one, so we passed twice in that same direction.
5. Wait about 30-40 minutes, when touching the concrete with your finger and only leaving a 6mm (5/16") mark it is time to edge the slab with the hand edger (rounding it so the edges are later strong)
6. Let it dry for another 30 minutes, once there is NO water on the surface, it is time to use the steel trowel, both the hand one for the perimeter, and the big one the Fresno trowel with the extension poles for the rest of the slab.
7. Let it dry for another 30 minutes and pass it again.
8. Let it dry for another 20-30 minutes and get inside with a couple of concrete sliders and finish it by hand with the steel hand trowel, be patient and work the whole thing up and down in several directions. Do it as many times as you want, the more you pass the smoother will get, leaving it to dry for 20-30min in between passes.
9. Our homemade sliders did not work very well... :) so we kept passing the big steel trowel with the pole until around 4 am, probably 4-5 passes in total.
10. Let it dry undisturbed for a few hours, before removing the form, and keep it always wet, watering the slab with a hose for the first 7 days. If it is freezing cold, then try not to wet it before night, or during the coldest times of the day since if the water freezes inside the open concrete pores, it will break the surface. We avoided watering right after sunset.
11. Will show you guys the rest of the process next week.
Note: all the times written above really depend on the temperature when you pour, so if it is too hot or too cold then you will need to speed or slow things up accordingly.
If you missed the first episode, watch the Workshop Build Series, where we start preparing this slab from scratch: https://bit.ly/WorkshopBuildSeries
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Our LSF metal profiles provider: https://www.bloken.pt/
Fully recommended, based in Portugal, they ship to all Europe.
Our Concrete tools from Colotool: www.nogosa.com
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