Date: July 15, 2025
Tuesday afternoon I was down at Lowes checking prices on drain pipe when I got a call from the SCM (Southern Concrete) dispatcher. The gruff voice asked "Are you getting a delivery tomorrow at 6AM of 48 yards?"
I answered "Yes, but at 9AM, as I've arranged with Jerry." Jerry is the cement pumper man and I had left all scheduling with SCM up to him.
"Well, Curly says to be there at 6AM --- I call him Curly --- so you better work it out with him!"
"Didn't he arrange last week for it to be at 9AM?"
"No he's got a card, so he just calls the day before and tells us where to go and how much to bring."
Can you dig that? After all the week-in-advance, late-delivery hassle I'd suffered through for the footer, I got a lesson in how the concrete world works. You got to be connected, man. And if you are not, there may be a reason to hire someone who is.
As I explained in the last post, the Gerry the ICF guy and his crew had to drive in from Tennessee so wanted to start a little later, which is why we'd all set 9AM. I'd just barely hung up when the phone rings again, this time its Jerry AKA Curly. "We need to start earlier," he explained, "or I'll loose my slot, and maybe the ICF guys will still be working on the wall when night falls!"
It was dawning on me, so to speak, that most of the cement pouring work was going to be done by Curly - I'll call Jerry Curly to reduce any J/Gerry confusion - and his crew anyway, so it would probably be OK to get started and ask Gerry to show up as early as he could make it. Gerry confirmed what I learned from Fox Blocks online training that I should make sure they started by filling a couple courses all the way around, then come back for another partial pass, so you don't have a real high stack of concrete next to nothing. Also you should start filling from corners and work toward the center sections so that you don't have a rolling wall of concrete hitting the corner and building pressure which might break the styrofoam. So that was the arrangement, with Curly saying he would hold SCM back a little while if he could.
I set my alarm and had my first espresso in hand by 5:45 and it was a beautiful QUIET morning. On about 6:20 I hear the sound of trucks. I remember to break out the camera and capture the moment:
Well it's Curly's truck anyway, sans concrete pump. "The pump man should already be here, he always gets to jobs early," Curly explained. More education for me - Curly doesn't actually do the pumping, he's got a couple of pump companies that he works with. Round about 6:35 we hear the real truck - the first load of concrete. But no sign of the guest of honor. Curly calls SCM dispatch and puts a hold on the remaining loads since we know we're going to be running late. However they already have two or three more loaded and on the way.
Curly decides to drive down the hill to look for him. We get the first cement truck up onto the lawn so its out of the way when the pump gets there. The clock is running on that concrete. After a bit another pickup shows up with lady who does the concrete finishing (we'll need to finish the roof of the root cellar), so I send her up to park in the carport. Fifteen minutes later Jerry returns with the required, and the upper driveway is packed with Curly's truck followed by the pickup towing the concrete pump. The perfect sequence, as it turns out. The pump truck had evidently taken a tour of Arrington Branch. I bet he had a lot of fun and provided some local entertainment turning his rig around at the dead ends up that valley.
Curly explains that an SCM manager is sitting in a pickup at the bottom of the driveway holding back the other trucks. Smart move - we already sorta had a traffic jam up there.
First truck got turned around and started feeding the beast a little after 7. The concrete looked fine - it wasn't kicking off yet.
Once the first truck was unloading, two more were sent up. One pulled onto the front lawn ready to turn around, the other parked in the lower lot.
The SCM boss came up to check out the scene:
Then a do-si-do among trucks to get the next one unloading and the third on deck.
Enough about trucks. The truck unloaded into the pump hopper and a long hose carried the concrete to the top of the wall. The hose was heavy of course, and three of four people helped wrestle it.
After we dealt with the 4th truck we had a pause because of the hold that Curly had placed early on had interrupted the queuing. Instead the three first trucks would make a second trip. Curly told me I should have the last truck bring a full 7 yards. Both I and Gerry calculated 47 yards, so by our lights that last truck could bring 5. Curly said it would cost a lot more to be short than to be over (cost is around $230 per yard), so I went with his advise. The cost if you run short is to pay a extra charge on a truck that is not full, and the extra hours of the pump on site which is something like $400/hour.
Gerry was happy to have a break in the flow since it would allow the concrete in the bottom of the wall to set up a little and stabilize everything.
We got going again a bit after 10AM. The first driver to make the round trip arrived with a flat tire from the snag-rock corner. The rim was seriously mauled so he got it good. The next truck arrives with cuts on the same passenger-side tire but still holding air. I thought it was remarkable that both drivers made it up fine on the first trip then cut the corner too tight on the second trip. As Aesop's Tales says "familiarity breeds contempt!" Luckily that misfortune didn't impact the job.
You can see the cement squeeze out of the gaps above the root cellar decking. We came back and did the root cellar roof pour as the last thing. As we got around the far wall with the 6th truckload Gerry said "I hope that we don't have too much more - we're just about done here - we may be able to finish the root cellar roof with this truck." Well too late for that info .... another $1500 worth of concrete has already left the plant and was on it's way!
Curly got creative. First he asked if we wanted to make the root cellar roof thicker: "It'll be stronger! We can add 2x4's to the top of the form." He had a few 2x4s and so did I so we added two more inches.
Then there was a ditch inside the footing on the east side so I thought might as well fill it up. That didn't use much and that last truck was far from empty. So Curly pulled the pump hose down to the driveway and put a complete layer over the old track and the new one we'd formed from the extra footer concrete. The concrete finisher lady smoothed it out nicely then Curly used our garden rake to put some texture on it (which is super helpful traction when backing up the hill), leaving me a smooth strip down the middle for bike riding.
New improved driveway (that thin bottom slop is what came out of the pump pipe when they flushed it).
With all this action I neglected to take any pictures of the root cellar concrete finishing, but it was impressive. Here is what it looked like later after the forms were down. You can see the line where we added 2" on to use up concrete:
The pump guys had a hell of a cleanup. Because of that delay between trucks, they had quite a bit of hardened concrete in the hopper. Evidently not the first time because they had an air tool to help chip it out. More good driveway material!
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