In the south-east corner of our usable property (at the forest/mountain line) there is this concrete area. Made up of ~4ft by ~4ft slabs on a rock base about 3 feet above grade it is about 40ft by 40ft squarish. This is where we decided to put the sawmill. It is the furthest away from our neighbors but is still easily accessible to equipment. We need easy access to move our timber in and our lumber out.

Being remote has its advantages and it's disadvantages. First of all for every tool we need, that we forgot, we have to walk a Kilometer round-trip trek to get. Additionally there is no electrical power or water.

So... We already have a generator (thanks to an auction). That's the power problem solved. There is also a perpetual spring fed water-trough (horse thing again) to supply the water to mix our own concrete. We were able to borrow a small cement-mixer and we purchased a load of cement and concrete-mix (sand/gravel aggregate). We thought we had everything under control.

Wow! Can I say that sucked. Oh I just did... Well... We hated every moment of it. Concrete work is truly back-breaking. Aside from the mixing (lot's of shoveling) there is form building, pouring, tamping, smoothing, form removal, structural re-enforcement. Yes it's true... We not only built a sawmill platform we built it to the specifications of an off-shore oil-drilling rig.

Additionally... The mixer we had could only mix a few cubic feet at a time and there was hundreds of cubic feet to pour. Ugh! Ultimately... It took days to build forms, days to pour and days to finish up. Maybe two weeks of hard (hard) work but the result was worth it.