“What do you want to be when you grow up?” – how many times have you heard that question?
Ok, so I’m not going to say when I was growing up that I wanted to be in the concrete game. In fact I think when I was growing up the idea of using concrete for anything other than buildings, bridges and paving slabs was furthest from most peoples’ minds.
Both of us at Concrete Carrot started our professional careers in an unorthodox manner. Neither of us could see ourselves as part of the corporate machine. Both of us derived little reward from the 9-to-5 grind working Monday to Friday. Neither of us have ever been happy (for any great length of time at any rate) just earning money. Money comes. Money goes. If you’re lucky it comes back again! Having discussed it at length (concrete takes a LONG time to cure), both of us have realised that making things pushes our buttons, floats our boats etc.
Both our father’s were and still are in construction, so it wasn’t a great leap for either of us to follow suit at a young-ish age. Completely separately at this time of course because we didn’t meet until just a few years ago. So we both spent what seemed like an age at the grindstone working, working, working. What we didn’t know then, as we do now, is that during those years we both learnt so much about construction in general, that now, when we come to fit polished concrete worktops or install a polished concrete wine rack in a bar or make a concrete firepit for a garden deck, we know how to fit, how to install, how much weight a deck can take etc.
If you’re lucky things in life fall into place. That’s how we feel. Not only are we creating things out of concrete (wood, metal and glass too as it happens) but we’ve also inadvertently armed ourselves with the knowledge that we would have had to have learnt very quickly otherwise.
So the next photo of us you look at on this website or the next photo of us you see on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or Instagram, know that we’re enjoying ourselves and pretty much living the dream (despite what it looks like in the photo!)
