just keep pouring, just keep pouring, just keep pouring pouring pouring. What do we do....We pour.

It's Offical,  we have half of the foundation/walls done!  The past week our maintanence crew has been working long and hard to get our first half of the building foundation/walls poured.  This will be a mini journal of all the steps we took to get a poured wall on top of the Footers that we had poured last week.

  The panel looking things here are called forms.  These are what our crew will use to form (go figure that's what the do) the cement into a wall.  You could liken them to the pail that we all loved to use as kids to make little walls of sand at the beach.  These are just bigger and instead of sand,  we use cement.

Here is a picture of some of our SAU students helping us out.  They are here with their 'Intro to Christian Camping" class for 'J' Term.  There were 4 groups of 3 or 4 students that took turns experiencing each department of Michindoh.  It's only fitting that the Maintenance part of that be pouring cement.  

For More information about SAU you can visit thier website at Arbor.edu.

    This is the East foundation wall all formed and ready for pouring.  As you can see it's near perfectly straight.  One of the hardest, and most important,  parts about setting the foundations is making sure they are square and straight.  If the wall is off by even a little bit,  there is a chance we would have to re-pour the wall.  We didn't want to re-pour the wall,  so we made sure to get it right the first time.  

Unfortunately, we didn't get any up close pictures of the wall being poured.  This is a picture as our crew is finishing up the first half of the wall.  

  This is a great picture of the freshly poured wall.  You may think "well, now it's done".  Not really.  Now our crew has to cover the cement so it doesn't cure to quickly.  One of the problems with pouring in the winter is the cold.  If the Cement freezes is can cause cracks in the foundation.  We all know that we need a firm foundation to build anything on.  In order to keep the cement warm our crew had to cover it and then heat it.  

Here you can see our home-brewed roofs that were made a few weeks ago.  Because we have some pretty gaping holes on the edge of these roofs the heat still was getting out.  So we decided to use the fly's from our summer camp miner's tents.  They seemed to do the trick.  

Just another picture of them tucking the cement in for the night.  We did have heaters that we call salamanders underneath the tarps.  They are capable of producing 250,000 BTU's each.  The great and crazy thing is that we didn't even fire them up.  The Cement produced enough heat on it's own to keep it nice and toasty under it's bedding.  

This is a picture before we put the roofs on.  The Contractor that will be putting up the building came out and set the anchor bolts for the building's truss work.  We felt much more comfortable letting them do it then trying to do it our self.  These bolts will be used to secure the frame of the building to its foundation.  

  Another rewind moment......  This is a picture of two of our crew helping to pour the pylons or towers in the middle of the building.  Each one of these 3' square towers sits on about 7' square footings. We showed a picture of them in the last post.  Both chunks of cement are held together by the unseen hero of our foundations,  the re-bar.