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In the sliding timeline that plunges towards definitive parenthood, there are 1.2 million tasks/projects/decisions to start/finish/complete/contract out.

I am usually daring enough to try to do anything once… and that has it’s short comings.

So, 400 years ago, I decided I was going to do a nice hard surface floor in my downstairs recreation room. Kerry and I had taken a nice trip to Jamaica only to come home to a shit-ridden room where our nervous dogs made sure to crap at every turn (and eat an entire lounge chair, but that’s small peanuts to 50 pounds of dog crap).

The carpet was lost.

I ripped it out and felt determined to put down a nice concrete surface that would endure such a crapping festival in the future.

In researching that nice concrete surface, I found out that trade secrets are sometimes very well protected. Concrete and mason work is one such area of protection. Ask someone at a store who works in concrete, and they start to eye you over as someone robbing their industry of money.

So, I finally think I’ve figured out how I’m going to do this basement and I have the materials. It’s a polymer concrete designed to be thinly applied over the top of existing concrete and look nice. It withstands over 5500 psi, much stronger than concrete, and it’s polymer resin gives it extra-protection from cracking/fracturing.

Sweet! So, I mix this stuff up with a friend. We start trowling it down in large puddles and wait. We wait longer and then start working the crete, but it isn’t ready, so we wait longer. We wait again, and again.

Hours go by and this puddle of concrete is barely setting up. A quarter till 2 am comes around the clock and my friends are crapped out (who could blame them?). The floor is still wet.

Around 2:30 in the morning, I take a home made knee board and start troweling 200 square feet of this stuff all on my lonesome.

About an hour into it, I feel a guitar string break in my wrist and my fingers go numb while my hand feels immense pain. I’m 1/10th of the way through. I keep troweling.

Some of the stuff sets firm before I can get to it, but overall, I get better than 80% of it done. Especially in the areas I was fresh on energy and didn’t feel in a rush, I felt I had done a very good job. The surface is smooth and even and looks really nice.

I added a sandstone like color to it that darkened it to a tan like rock color and in the areas where I had done some good patient work, it looks really nice.

Now, however, my wrist is in a wrap as often as I can keep it there. My fingers continue to be numb for most of the day. My wrist aches and did I mention that laying concrete is entirely a hands and knees job? Check in the back pain, neck pain, leg pain and shoulder pain (wax on wax off Danielsan).

Oddly, I enjoyed the work quite a bit. I found concrete a very enjoyable material to work with and I hope to have an excuse to work with it again, although I have a great deal of tips I’d offer myself.

1. The setting time is directly related to ambient temperature and humidity. Cool and humid = up all night hurting yourself for no reason. Hot and dry = don’t step away too fast… it’ll be done and stuck!

2. Have pain meds on the ready. Even if all had gone perfect, my shoulder and arms would still be in the state they are in.

3. This is an OCD activity. My friend, tried as hard as he may, could not smooth a surface to save his life. It’s easy to almost get a smooth surface and then a little haste on the traul suddenly rips a nice slice in otherwise great concrete. It’s an odd type of detail orientation and I was shocked how patient I was with it.

I still have a little more to pour, but when it’s done, I’ll upload some photos of the good areas and the bad. Should be relatively interesting.

Until then, I leave you with a picture of a goat stuck in a fence. This is one of my mom’s goats out on her farm. Kerry and I were visiting and meeting her new colt named Jasper. I’ll do a little post on him, too. I have lot’s of pictures of the baby horse to go through. He’s a cool lil’ booger.