Poured the concrete for the house retaining wall on Wednesday – went reasonably smoothly, except for the operator not really getting the concept of “a bit more concrete slowly, please” and throwing concrete around with complete abandon. So we ended up with some largish blobs of concrete not inside the form.
Spent today removing the formwork. I’d expected this to be a bit easier than it was, but the plywood was tightly wedged between the concrete and the sides of the trench in a lot of places, so I couldn’t just break the seal between concrete & ply and lift them out. I also didn’t clean up enough of the bonus blobs, which of course stuck to the ply from the *other* side as well and made those pieces almost impossible to remove.
I think a better option might be to put wedges in behind the ply (rather than backfilling) so when I disassemble it I can just take the wedges out and knock the ply off? I’ll also experiment with putting builders’ plastic over the ply.
Anyway, the end result looks pretty good (not that it matters, because the concrete will all be buried), and very solid:
I also did a couple of these cutouts in the concrete:
to give some more room for services under the wall panels.
