Watching the Concrete Set

The new house being built just down the road seems to be going up in fits and starts. Each separate step seems to take half a day at most, followed by days of prepping(?), planning(?), scheduling(?) the next step.

The first load of concrete was used to make the outline of the foundation for the entire house, including garage. The first load of cinder blocks, several days later was placed to encase the line of concrete. A few days after that, the small bulldozer came back and refilled and leveled the space enclosed by the wall so the actual poured foundation would be only a few inches think instead of the foot or so height of the wall.

In the only case of two things happening at the same time I've seen so far, while the bulldozer was bulldozing, a crew with entrenching tools dug up the road median and the verge on our side (down by Neighbor Dan) which is where the the city water mains run. They didn't dig up the street itself so I suppose they bored under the pavement in order to run their pipes. I didn't see it happen but everything's filled in again so there must be a connection set up.

Last week more cement mixer trucks came by and poured the foundation for the house and garage and also put in the driveway. That took a little more than two hours, including the smoothing and leveling. The entire work crew spent the rest of the day sitting around watching the concrete set. I suppose wet cement presents an attractive nuisance and we certainly have kids in the area who would take advantage of the opportunity to put footprints, hand prints, initials and other graffiti wherever they thought they could get away with it, but surely one guard would have been sufficient, no?

Yesterday, several skids of cinder blocks were dropped off and, already today, the outer wall of the house is up over six feet high.

They may not work often, but when they do, they work fast.