Week 38, 2026 – Pour day: the foundation slab goes in
Last week the site looked like it was waiting for the concrete mixers. On Tuesday, just before eight in the morning, they arrived. From upstairs the street is lined with blue Pouw trucks, drums turning, one pulled up right under the window and more queuing past the parked cars toward the site office. At the far end a red concrete pump has set up by the hoarding with its boom already unfolded over the fence. A woman walks to work along the pavement as if it's any other morning.
Five minutes later, down at the fence, the pump's boom reaches in over the whole plot, red and white against the brick of the apartment block behind. The end hose hangs down to a crew in hard hats at the back corner, who are guiding it along the timber retaining wall. The first strip of wet concrete is already spreading over the mesh there, while the rest of the rebar deck still glows orange in the low sun.
From the other side the rhythm of the work becomes clear. One man holds the heavy hose steady while the concrete pours out, another pulls a vibrating screed across it to level it, and two more follow with long rakes and poles. A foreman in a black jacket stands on the untouched mesh a few metres ahead, watching the grey edge move toward him. Around the column bars the concrete is already flat and shiny.
By half past four in the afternoon the orange is gone. The whole footprint is one grey slab, from the retaining wall to the pavement, with only the column bars and the crane mast sticking up out of it. Three ride-on power trowels are working the surface, two with drivers and one parked, their blades leaving overlapping swirls. The pump and the trucks have left, and it's hard to believe the street was full of mixers this morning.