solarbird | the last paid project before layoffs

With Anna getting laid off/facing contract expiration, we’re pulling back hard on projects we’d hoped to do this year. But we did go ahead and order this last one, since it had been in the queue and was also not the sort of thing you want to leave forever.

So. The original owners some 20+ years ago built a smallish patio when they built the rest of the house. It was built on infill, so naturally it’d been sinking as well as tilting slowly ever since. While thankfully still intact as a slab, it had reached the point where it was impinging against upon the house’s siding from the side and kind of bowing it out, and had also kind of added an extra mini-step below the doors out to it. Plus the retaining wall holding up all the relevant fill worried me a little – because of all that settling – so we brought someone in to check everything out.

(The wall was basically okay. There were a couple of voids so they blew in some fill to be safe. It only took a couple of minutes – that and the slab both proceeded much more quickly than I expected, really.)

I’ve never seen concrete lifted before and it was really neat to watch. The holes they drilled through to raise the lab were a lot smaller than I expected, which was great, and watching a big slab of rock (concrete, whatever) lift itself off the ground was kind of startling and a little amazing. You could also see it flexing a bit as it did so, which was also really neat. If you don’t know this, concrete is supposed to flex; the ability to flex is what makes it strong in actual use. (If it couldn’t flex, it would shatter pretty quickly in actual use just from heat expansion.) But knowing all that from theory is really different to actually seeing it in person, so that was again really cool.

I think the biggest surprise was that I didn’t really expect the patio to look better? It wasn’t the kind of sloping that really hit you in the face, and it also really needs a pressure wash, which it’ll get after the concrete they used to fill the drill holes cures for a week. I was far more concerned about saving the house’s siding than looks.

But I guess it was enough slope to notice after all, because it genuinely looks better now. So bonus points to house House, and house Slabjack too, since they’re the ones who did it. I just got to watch like a housecat through the glass doors, honestly kinda fascinated.

Anyway, it’s nice to have that done before battening down for a while. Hopefully not too many whiles, because things are pretty yikes in tech right now, and, well, see my previous comments – the MAGAts really do want to crash the economy and blame it on Biden. Hopefully their major donors will yank enough chains hard enough to bring them back to heel.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.