Saturday October 24th: It begins! Destruction mode...
We hired a jack hammer and took to the existing slab that was the car port. It was a tense few minutes to begin with as we didn't know what kind of reinforcement (if any) was within that slab... this job could take days, or weeks - we didn't know. Luckily for us, whoever poured this particular slab was pretty dodgy and there was no reo to speak of! Unless you count the hundreds!! of cane toads living in the cracks and crevices, all of which needed somewhere to go when we destroyed their home... Ever seen a mass exodus of concrete dust covered cane toads? It's disgusting... and a little bit cool. I wonder if they survived covered in so much dust?
While generally, I don't get to get out and help much with the manual labour, this particular day, I got down and dirty removing the concrete. MIL Robyn stayed inside (in the air conditioning) with Ben, while Adam, Max (FIL) and I spent several hours taking turns on the jack hammer, moving concrete bits to the trailer and doing runs to the tip. (Ok, I don't actually go near the power tools - I'm likely to remove a limb if I did).
All went fairly smoothly, except for the local tip not allowing us in after 3 or 4 trailer loads. Apparently you can't dump that kind of thing on a weekend...??? That's ok, we said, and drove the extra 5 mins down the road to the other tip. They were cool.
At the end of the day (or at least, when we'd had enough) we'd gotten through almost half the slab! We'd had the foresight to hire the jack hammer for the entire weekend... sadly, we didn't think to check council laws, and it turns out that Sundays are "construction noise free" in our area.... so, we had a jack hammer we weren't allowed to use, and half a slab for a few more weeks.
Here are some photos:
Adam making the first 'incision'...
End of Day 1
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