On Monday neighbor John and his helper (the graders) and David and his helpers (the concrete workers), prepared the basement and garage floors for pouring concrete. John did quite a bit of grading with his skid-steer loader, skimming high places and pulling gravel back into lower spots.

That’s a laser level in the foreground.

The rest of the workers used shovels and a purpose-made rake to pull gravel around. This is David. You may not be able to tell, but his arms are about as big as my legs. That’s what happens when you work with concrete for years.

When I built the house we live in now, I did all that work by myself with my skid-steer loader. When I was done back then, I called David to do the concrete pour and finishing. When I look back on what I did on our current house, I think I must have been either very naïve or fairly competent. I’m not sure which.

The temperature Monday was in the lower 90s before lunch, although the official temperature as shown online was only around 88 then. The only work I did was to walk around and pick up pieces of wood and wire from the gravel, but I was pretty thoroughly dehydrated by evening.

David is supposed to put up forms for the basement and garage slabs on Tuesday. If everything goes according to schedule, I’ll call the inspection department for an inspection of the preparations. The actual pour will probably happen on Wednesday, assuming the inspector OK’s everything Tuesday.

As of Monday night, the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday was for a high of 97. I’m going to get hot just watching.

This is all encouraging progress, but over the weekend we had even more encouraging news: the family that was interested in buying our house has agreed to do so. We arrived at a price I think both of us (buyers and sellers) felt comfortable with. We don’t have it in writing yet, because we don’t have a good closing date, but I think we’ll probably pick a conservative date and then go for it.

We continue to work on finishing the basement. Leah has almost completed staining the doors, and I stained the windows. The downstairs bathroom looks almost complete now, with a light fixture and a mirror over the vanity, and a working toilet in the corner. When I walked away from it Sunday afternoon, I had a flashback to when I was finishing our current house. It was to the point that small increments of progress began to add up to make a significant difference in the look of the rooms. That feels good.