Ode to Concrete

Slab, glorious slab!  As of this afternoon, we have a fabulously curing hunk of concrete behind our old house.  It's the beginning of the new house!  Here we are, sitting at the breakfast table, looking out over the porch.

 Welcome to the family room.  Please mind the rebar.

Here's the entrance to the porch from the garage, looking into the kitchen and family room.

And please enjoy the awesome closet under the stairs.

I know that the concrete is still curing and hardening and all that, but I'll admit I did have to frolic on it a little.  It's really nice, a giant slab of reinforced concrete that your house is going to stand on top of--super nice.

So Monday, clearly, was pretty rainy.  Let me tell you, I'm lucky to have made it out alive after having taken those pictures--that clay-goo-mud was epic.  On Tuesday I went by and happened to catch my new friend, the concrete guy, and he said they had been lucky to be able to reschedule the seven trucks worth of concrete (!) we were going to need for Wednesday, because otherwise they'd have to wait for next week.  He seemed to think that the rain hadn't hurt the earthworks much, though.  His guys were hard at work wrangling massive amounts of wood for the forms and steel for inside the slab:

It was unseasonably cold that morning (40s! In Houston, for April, that's downright apocalyptic.), and the poor guys had a rough time between the damp and the cold.

By Wednesday the sun was fully out and they were putting in even more steel but not quite ready to pour.  My buddy said they'd start pouring Thursday morning.  I got there around noon to see a truck in action:

And then swung back by around three that afternoon to see the last of it poured (and make some small handprints in the porch steps).

My husband swung by on his way home around seven, and they were still out there, smoothing and buffing every last bit.  They were out again this morning taking off all of the forms.

I've seen few lovelier things in my entire life.