He laughed, took a heavy slug of his beer, and plunked it down on the deck, then jumped back over and started working again pretty quickly on the wooden steps. While Tony and some others worked on pouring the concrete sidewalk by the side of the house, Warren said, “I need to get this cut fast before the concrete pours.” He looked at Doreen and added, “Because of the sawdust.”
She gasped as the three of them immediately worked on the steps. The boards were cut, fitted, and nailed in place all the way from the front around the side and then stopped for the piece that would get a little bit of a railing and garden trellis on either side and then the shorter steps were put down on Richard’s side of her house. And, all of a sudden, she watched as concrete started coming, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, all the way around to the far side of the house. And one guy was straightening and filling, making a sidewalk along the side too. “Too bad we can’t have some all along this side of the house,” she said.
“You probably can,” Tony said. “We’ve still got all the bags yet that I came with. That’s enough to do this too. But right now, we have to deal with the truck because that concrete has to keep churning, and we’ve only got a certain time period before it’s no good anymore.”
She stepped back immediately as the men ran wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow to the truck to fill up what was all the framed space in front of her here. Mack tucked her off to the side and said, “The dust is horrific, so let’s just keep you back and out of the way.”
“Are they supposed to do it by wheelbarrow?”
“If they have to, they will, yep,” he said. “It’s pretty normal, and it saves you a thousand-plus for a pumper truck.”
“Well, I really could use the savings on the thousand dollars,” she said, “because that would be a huge dig into my money.”
“You might have gotten a deal down to $700,” he said, “but, chances are, with them having to go and wash out the truck again, that would be another $150 fee too.”
She rolled her eyes at him, confused. “This stuff is so much money,” she said. Three wheelbarrows ran back and forth. “Is there any way to see what they’re doing?”
He led her alongside the fence to see better. A chute coming off the concrete truck delivered concrete, slowly filling up a wheelbarrow, and then it was stopped, and that wheelbarrow would disappear, and another one would load up. It would fill up, then stop, until the third one got in position. And, by the time the third one was done, the first one was back. And the men were literally running. This kept on going for almost an hour. And then the truck driver said, “This should be almost it.”
“Looks good,” Tony said. “We’re still short a little bit, but if you’ve got a couple more wheelbarrow loads in there …”
“We’ll see,” the trucker said. “You’ve got whatever I’ve got here. It’s a hefty five yards, but I’m not sure that’s quite enough.”
“We’ve got some concrete we can mix too, for that matter, but I don’t have the same tint,” Tony said. “As long as everything along that one side is the same. Looks like we’ve still got a bunch here, so do all the back on the far side and then see if we can get this sidewalk here run. After that, we can do my concrete bags over on the far side, and that won’t be too bad. We still must move the materials off that side so that we can frame up the sidewalk though.”
And, sure enough, by the time they were done, one wheelbarrow full sat there, waiting for somebody to determine where it needed to go. She was amazed at the amount of concrete that had just been leveled onto her place, and, as she watched, men were straightening and doing some weird up-and-down pounding in it and then smoothing it out. Mack tried to explain the different stages, and she was seriously fascinated. The sidewalk went right up to the front of the house, and she was amazed. But that meant there was absolutely no way for anybody to walk on either side of her house, except for about a six-inch space alongside the fence. They’d paved a walkway, a patio, and a path down to the creek.
“I guess now, gravel along the edge there?”
“Gravel and maybe some spray to stop any weeds coming through,” Tony said. “And you’ll need to put a little bit alongside the house there too because we can’t pour concrete right up against it.”
She nodded. “And that’ll probably be a truckload of gravel too.”
“No,” he said. “A couple yards. Not very much land here. And, on the other side, you have to do the same.”
It didn’t take much more than another thirty minutes to an hour, and, all of a sudden, the concrete was done. As she looked, all the stairs had boards and so did all the top of the deck. And suddenly it all came to an end. She stared at it in shock, at her beautiful deck, and noted that two of the men were putting in railings, one to go down the steps on the side and one to go along the top of the deck down one side. They had several support posts in place.
She smiled. “That’s like perfect timing.”
“It is.” Mack stood beside her.
As she watched, the men popped a railing piece between two supports and screwed it in then repeated it until the one side was done.
“Wow,” she said as the process was repeated on the steps down again to the side of the house, where the second railing was put in, anchoring one end of it to the wall of the house as well. And then, she
