All right, all right, all right! I’ve talked about this a couple of times and the day is finally here. Are you just so excited??? Well, even if you’re not – we’re finally going to see the final product of our concrete planter number one.

Here is the only part of the “unboxing” that was photographed. Because Sue did the majority of the unboxing one morning while I was working. She said that the outside of the box came off rather easily. The interior was a bit more difficult, but using a piece of wood and pounding it between plywood and concrete worked wonders.

Here it is, in all it’s glory! One of my favorite things about this planter is the two tone aspect. You can definitely tell the difference from our first pouring to our second. I love that look!!! We didn’t plan it, but I’m so glad it came out that way.

Closer look for you. I’m wondering what causes the color difference. Was there more water in our first pour than the second? Would that make a difference in the color? The first pour was made of a couple of bags we’d had sitting around for a few months… would that make a difference? Maybe the 2nd pour was from a different brand of premix? I truly have no actual knowledge, but I’m happy for the result.

We also had a couple of issues of the concrete not getting compacted within the frame and therefore leaving these really interesting characteristic voids. Or whatever you want to call them. I thing these make the planter really interesting.

Here are some more voids. I think it’d be neat to paint them some bright contrasting color. I think it’d be rather neat. The chickens might end up fixating on the colors. A friend of mine who was an amazing woodworker used to tell me
“If you can’t fix it, feature it.” A Japanese woodworker that my friend learned from would use gold to fill unexpected cracks and make the piece even more beautiful. It is the philosophy of Kintsugi, mostly practiced with broken pottery.

As you can probably tell, I’m pretty proud of this work! We did our best, it came out wonderfully. This photo is of the 2nd one we started. We’ve made some changes to see if we can eliminate the voids. We used 3 bags of concrete this time, so we’ll see if we end up with the color variance again. We wanted to finish it last weekend, but that was in the midst of our wind storm.

We may be able to complete this one Saturday. We’ll document along the way and also show photos after it has had time to cure and we do the “unboxing”. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!