It is a myth that building with concrete is cheap compared to other building methods. It is true that there are hard-to-find or expensive materials in concrete, but if you use ready mix cement and don’t spend a lot of time setting the mix, it is less expensive than any other method.

The difference between ready mix cement and mortar or concrete (a mixture of sand, gravel, and Portland cement) is that the cement in ready mix comes in a bag—in some places it comes in plastic bags. Ready mix doesn’t have to be mixed. You just open the bag and dump it into the hole to be filled, adding water as needed. To make a concrete foundation you have to add sand first, then gravel (which stays on top), and then Portland cement. Then you have to mix the whole thing together by hand or with a machine for at least an hour before pouring it into place. This can take up to six hours and cost $1 per square foot if you do it yourself. Ready mix costs about $0.20 per square foot if you do it yourself, or $1 per square foot if you hire someone else to do it for you.

For the longest time, ready mix cement and concrete were both called “concrete,” though there were two very different kinds. The concrete you buy in a bag at the hardware store is just fine for building your house. It is made from a slurry of sand and cement, mixed with water. Ready mix is different. Ready mix is a mixture of cement and sand just like the one you buy at Home Depot, but it also includes a bit of clay that makes it more like stone-based mortar.

In the 1950s, when these things were first being invented, they were very similar in price. But by contrast to today, there was no ready mix industry at all in the 1950s. It was just a question of whether your contractor had a bucket truck or not. There was no way to know what kind of concrete he would be making until he started mixing it up.

If you’ve ever made a concrete foundation and poured the mix in, you know that it can be hard to get smooth walls. If you try to make a perfectly level surface, for example, there are always little bumps where the concrete hasn’t mixed well enough. They’ll be covered by the next layer of concrete. But if you pour the mix from a height, the bumps are still there.

That’s another effect of being ready-mix: if you don’t hit every spot exactly right, you may end up with a bump. But because it will be covered by the next layer of concrete, no one will see it.

As with ready mix cement, so with building codes. Governments regulate building codes in part because buildings have lots of little imperfections that no one sees until later. If the government doesn’t regulate building codes, builders will still build buildings with lots of little imperfections (which will then be discovered later), but they won’t make them illegal to build.*

Cement is a mixture of sand with limestone, clay and other ingredients. Concrete is the same, but mixed with gravel and crushed stone.

Ready mix cement, which you can buy from a hardware store, consists of sand, limestone and clay mixed together in proportions specified by the manufacturer. There are several grades of ready mix, from the lowest to the highest: CPVC (sometimes called “composite”) concrete; Portland cement; and concrete made with fly ash (the residue of burning coal). The fly ash comes from burning coke ovens.

There are other kinds of cement as well. You can also buy cement that is pre-mixed, a method developed by the ancient Romans (who were among the first people to use concrete extensively), where they would mix cement with water and carry it to where there was building work to be done. In this way they could get more building done on less land than they could if they had to haul separate components all over town.

In recent times there has been a lot of innovation in cement manufacturing. For example, you can now make concrete out of recycled plastic bottles by mixing them with Portland cement at a ratio agreed between supplier and client.

The ready mix concrete we buy in the supermarket isn’t really concrete. It is a product made of cement and sand, in a particular ratio that is determined by the manufacturer, but it isn’t really concrete. Concrete is self-built: it consists of a mixture of cement and sand that depends on the properties of the ingredients you start with.

The ready mix you buy from the store is not self-built, either. It’s a product made from pre-mixed ingredients, and those ingredients were chosen by someone else. The price you pay for it includes not only the price of the ingredients but also a large amount of packaging, advertising and labor costs.

It’s not as though concrete doesn’t exist without pre-mixes. The kind you make yourself is called dry mix concrete; it’s cheaper to make than ready mix, but it has all the disadvantages too. Ready mix isn’t going to get any cheaper soon; if prices did fall, someone would have to figure out how to make dry mix cheaper than ready mix, or people would stop buying it altogether.

The only way to make dry mix concrete cheap enough for ordinary homeowners is to do most of the work yourself: mixing the cement by hand, mixing in free materials like aggregate (broken

There are two ways to make concrete. One is to mix cement and sand together in a batch. The other is to mix the same materials in advance, then pour them into the right place at the right time.

The ready-mix method has several advantages, but one is its simplicity: you don’t have to do any measuring or weighing. It also has disadvantages, like leaving a large amount of concrete sitting around while it sets.

There’s another way to make concrete that has many of the same advantages and none of the disadvantages. You buy ready-mix concrete from a company that mixes it for you in advance and sells it on a truckload by truckload.

The important thing about this system is that it means you can get professional-quality concrete, which is not easy to come by at home. (The cement and sand are mixed for you in a plant; it’s just that there isn’t anything else mixed with them.)

There’s a reason why in the U.S. we have so many concrete buildings and so little of it: because concrete is hard to make and easy to repair, and when it gets old it starts falling apart. But there’s also a reason why all those buildings fall down so easily: they were built in the first place by people who knew how to do things right. And there are plenty of reasons why we don’t build houses like that anymore, because, well, we don’t know how to do it right any more.

You can be an expert at something without being an expert at anything else. There’s no point trying to be an expert at everything. But if you’re willing to learn, you can be an expert at anything you care about.