Concrete in Montes Claros, Nov 2009

OKAY, so you get to see the finished job first. I am too lazy to go back and upload the photos for the THIRD time in the right order and right photos. This is now the finished concrete work to the west side of Wem and Sara's two bedroom home in Montes Claros, Brasil. It is under the clothes line and was always getting weedy, dirty and allowing water to stand along the west wall. Wem did all the leveling and I did some of the shoveling to get the concrete distributed. He did get some shin splints that evening!!
This is the cement mixer!! You got it, two guys with shovels and big work hoe. In this shot, we are moving some sand to behind the wall so if it rains the water running off the houses and into the rain trough won't wash the sand away. We started by filling and dumping 4 wheel barrows of sand for the two piles on the existing concrete slab. The slab is actually the top of the septic holding tank for the four housing units in this row of 3 two bedroom units and 2 one bedroom units. Wemerson had one cubic meter of sand delivered and it was mainly piled on this side of the wall, but we only needed half. He then added one large bag of cement to each sand pile and mixed thoroughly with the large hoe. Then we scrounged around the complex to rake, clean and transport 4 more wheel barrows of black stone and dumped 2 each on top of each sand/cement pile. Yep, you got it, add water and mix thoroughly again. There are cement trucks in the area, but our job was way too small to involve them and Wem says they more than double the cost of materials.

Of course we did have some expert help during this process, but only had to repair one small hand print!! Cleanup was the most exciting for some of us?? Lucas is at the age where he HAS to mimic whatever is being done, at least if it is the first time or if you don't want him to!! I had "bet" wem that we would need more bags of cement and more sand to do this job, BUT we actually used half the sand AND still had enough to do some work on the east side of the next unit (behind me)!! Shows you how little concrete work I have done lately!!

I will be posting some events on a daily basis to catch up my blog. The computers at MTC went down about 6 days after I arrived and were not working when we left for Belo on Dec 3.