A Large Concrete Poop
Mutiny on the building site and a new piece of art
Things can change very quickly here in the Valley of the Stars.
The first draft of this week’s despatch began: “This week our dream has really started looking like a fabulous reality…”
By that same afternoon it needed a complete rewrite, and this line needed to be cut entirely:
“I don’t want this to sound like an Academy Award acceptance speech for a film that isn’t done, as we’re far from finished yet, but we are just a little more confident that one day we might be.”
It was around the time I was writing those words that the cement mixer got bogged down in the mud, the polished concrete floor guys went on strike and tonnes of cement started hardening in the truck.
Things had been ticking over nicely and although it was a little later than we expected, the stars had been aligning for the final floors to be laid.
We want a particular polished-concrete look in a sandy, gr-iege colour for all our floors, inside and out, and so had contracted a polished concrete floor specialist to do the job.
Sr Manuel, our main builder, had been playing nicely with them to prepare the surfaces and everything as required – the Moldovan Front Row plasterers did the first layers of concrete flooring inside and Heatpump Paulo had also laid the underfloor heating pipes on time.
Our great friends Becky & Rachel had been staying – full of encouragement and enthusiasm for the project and the podcast, which Pete Emmerson had also been working on many hours a day.
There’d been some rain – we’ve had quite a lot and it’s very welcome (the lake is already very full and it’s only November!)
We even had a weekend up in Lisbon for our brother-in-law Pasi’s 50th birthday – an amazing whirlwind of fantastic people from all over the world and some incredible food and wine among family and friends.
It was a Big Week ahead, but we were ready – and also gained from a slight delay with the concrete truck which would come a day later than planned to let the land dry out a bit.
When the polished concrete guys arrived on day one they brought a surge of energy and urgency, wheeling barrows of cement from the mixer – sometimes even breaking into song – and then staining and polishing the floors beautifully.
It was after day one when I started writing what I originally called “A Big Week in the Valley,” but then came day two...
“Muito complicado,” the cement mixer driver kept mumbling to himself, as he did circles around his stranded truck.
Arriving late to the scene I wondered why the guys weren’t able to get the cement out of the truck and onto the floors – and then extract a much lighter mixer from the mud.
It became clear the pourers and polishers weren’t doing the pouring bit: they were refusing to wheel cement the extra few meters from the stuck truck. They downed wheelbarrows as it was more than their jobsworth to do it.
Their boss wasn’t here and through some patchy Portuguese eavesdropping of phone conversations, I began to realise this was an industrial dispute.
The idea of the company losing a lot of money in spoiled concrete was apparently part of their leverage – they didn’t want to find a solution.
As the driver said, Muito complicado.
Then things suddenly got even more complicated when the clock ran out.
The concrete was no longer useable in the floors...it was too old...and Mr Complicado started to panic...what was he going to do with his delivery?
He didn’t want to be the driver returning to base with a useless concrete block for a van, and pleading with the strikers, he persuaded the guys to start passing up buckets of water from puddles to try and stop it from setting.
Our builder Sr Manuel and his guys shrugged – he had no jurisdiction over other contractors and just found it astonishing the polished floors team had felt the need to reverse forty plus tonnes of truck into a puddle just so moving wheelbarrows was going to be easier.
By the time I’d arrived they had tried various things to get it out, but the dispute with the boss had lost a load of time.
With Mr Complicado sweating it, Justo the tractor genius who can take a top off a beer with a huge metal digging bucket (we suspect) gave it a go...but it wouldn’t budge.
Our ever-diligent engineer José added industrial tribunal negotiator to his wide skillset of general problem-solver, diplomat, intermediary and superstar, and was doing everything he could remotely from another building site many miles away.
He also pulled in a favour from the Cow King – our neighbourhood farmer and his mate from the hunting club.
Sadly the King of the Cows got mixed up with where José was talking about and went to the wrong site to begin with.
That’s when I realised the mixer guy needed a lot of water to save his skin...and his truck.
Dragging pipes through the pools of water I managed to reach the van, but then a crushed electrical cable somewhere amid the miles of mud tripped the electricity and the water pump stopped.
I felt like I was in some odd Benny Hill throwback running up and down the hill between pump houses and power stations flicking switches on and off, breakers up and down and then communicating it all to the mudbath men.
By the time António Oliveira – O Rei das Vacas – arrived, the water was running, the concrete was watery, Mr Complicado was more relaxed and I had a very sore back.
“He won’t be able to do it,” Justo said, nodding at the tractor and the depth the mixer’s tyres had sunk into the clay – and Justo is a man used to getting things out of places.
A night of high drama
For once Millicent the Land Rover was the last car standing. What began as a lunch with new friends ended as a dramatic escape out of a car window from a raging river, a car written off in a flash flood and a truck upended in a ditch. Millicent lost an eyelash.
The first attempt ended in failure, but that’s because of all the random bricks and planks thrown into the mud to try and give the insanely heavy truck some traction.
Once removed Sr Oliveira went again, and this time the truck was up and out and everyone was smiling.
Particularly the cow king, who despite having to go out of his way to help us, was delighted to have got one over a bunch of blokes from the city who came to the country thinking reversing a truck into a waterhole was going to end any other way.
Mr Complicado was delighted – he drove off to the factory with a wave and a smile of thanks that gave me no indication of what he was going to do the moment I went back down to our house for an hour-long Zoom call.
“They did what?” I asked as poor Ana, who had risen from her sick bed with a really nasty cold, to deal with the chaos while my meeting was on.
“They dumped all the concrete on our land,” she said.
I went back up...there is was...a huge mass of quickly hardening concrete poop spread over maybe 50m2 like washed out lava in little towers: a hot mud spring frozen in time.
Mr Complicado had turned around, driven back onto the site and emptied his whole truck on the ground.
I asked Justo whether I should try spreading it into bits to make it set in small rocks rather than one solid outcrop...with no nearby shovel, and a worsening back (courtesy of two disks apparently slightly more prolapsed than before this madness began).
He just laughed “it’ll be hard as rock in an hour,” and he was right. I didn’t even try.
Here was us thinking the biggest issue in the whole polished concrete pouring operation was going to be making sure LBD (the Little Black Dog) didn’t spend the evenings tapdancing on it while it set.
So now we have a wonderfully large and unmoveable slab of concrete poop languishing by the place our main gate is supposed to go.
José reassures us it’s not our responsibility, but it’s hard to see how we can force someone else to take it away.
Perhaps we can get someone with a pneumatic drill to cut it up into small bits which we could use as aggregate for our road...to save it from becoming a mud bath.
That sounds a lot more costly than ordering some pre-crushed rocks to be delivered.
The following day the building site was like a ghost town...until the painters turned up...and then Heatpump Paulo arrived: “I was expecting everyone to be very busy,” he said, with the wise words: “we all just want the same thing, right? To get the work done.”
Not necessarily it seems. Everyone else was either giving it a miss after a bit of overnight rain, or planning their employment tribunal statements.
The day after that nobody turned up at all. Let’s hope something happens on Monday...
OMG you guys, you really have had more than your share of “ Your turn in the barrel “ it does make for amazing blogs. However, enough is enough now. You need a break 😀😀 Fingers crossed it goes smoothly at least for the next few weeks. Look after your back Al, and hope you are feeling a lot better Ana.
This too will (somehow) pass...