December 3, 2003 (cont'd): The mud flows….there's me 'helping' by putting in as much re-bar as possible and tying it together with wire ties. We used up a whole bunch of the metal

re-bar that was left over from breaking it out of the old driveway.  I was running around like crazy so

that I could make sure we had as much re-bar as possible all wired together. With the metal thing..more is better.  Then I get out of the way and let the guys smooth it out.

The next few hours were spent smoothing and re-smoothing until the concrete was ready to have the control lines grooved into it. After those are done, Carl starts 'brooming'.  The long blue handle on his broom is crossing this picture as he brooms the first part of the driveway. We had Carl leave us a small spot to put in the family's hand prints. Luna wasn't happy about it.

After all was dry, we found that there was puddling of water at the west end. Scott and Cars spend hours trying to fix it. They grind down the concrete and cover it with a coat of concrete 'thinset' to try to retain the 'broomed' look. (months later we'll find that this didn't really work and now we have a place that doesn't look that great there. They spent a lot of time trying to fix it, but what we ended up with is a grooved

channel in the concrete where the water will flow, but it really doesn't look that great. This is probably the only thing we're really unhappy with. (except for the fact that I had to replace about half of the bolts that they put into the concrete because they were either forgotten or placed in the wrong spot.)…...more coming…...