I was commited to making niches before curing took place, as during Hootenanny I we didn’t do the ‘carving’ early, before the concrete 'cured’.  This time, we made (hopefully) the right number of niches, at the right time.  We used a chisel and mallet to cut these out between 24-50 hrs after the material settled. We tried to avoid laying barbed wire where we were going to 'niche out’, but we usually forgot and cut the barbed wire when we ran into it with our chisel.  Compared to 15 years ago, working a grinder for 6 hours to carve out a bookshelf in the ’Sunrise Dome’, this was heaven:-)

Teen Dome:

Eli’s sink shelf.

Eli’s Art and Speaker shelf

We’d planned an easy ‘cut’ and it took ~ 3 hrs with a chisel to get this moon window opened up.  We’d waited ~ 36 hrs, much too late in the curing process to try a cut  of this size - the material was just too solid.

Bedroom Dome:

Art niches

Music and Art Shelf 

Bathroom Dome: