David Linnard - Disaster Mansion

15/11/202105/01/2022

They Came, They Poured, They Concreted

Yes we got our concrete pour on Friday!!! Big thanks to Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry) and his crew who did a great job! This was a big big day for us and has taken about three months to prepare for and we got it done just before winter sets in. It’s been quite the slog and so pleased this is behind us now. As a reminder this is how the ground floor looked in April.

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Final thickness of the concrete was about 4 & 1/2 – 5″ which is a decent thickness and we also added rebar mesh supports to lift the rebar and radiant tubing to the top third of the slab, this will make the radiant heating system more efficient and responsive. We also managed to drop this new floor by about 5″ giving us a little more headroom.

This is the crew, I didn’t catch all their names but pictured (in no order) is Al, Anthony and Pat, and I have to credit Pat with the “Adirondack wheel barrow chair”, it looks really, really comfortable and it’s portable!

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The last few shots were just before the pour and shows how we used small supports (known as chairs in the trade) to lift up the rebar mesh and Pex tubing. Concrete guys don’t really like these but Dave from the building department wanted them and I think that was a good call.

For some reason the video camera shut down before they had finished with the power trowel. I think they did three passes, using two different sized machines.

Post pour, if the pictures look a little steamy that’s because it was steamy. Temperature was about 70°F and steam was coming off the concrete. Al did say to expect this as it’s an exothermic reaction. We also have a few heaters to make sure the temperature doesn’t drop too low – tonight it’s dropping to almost 0°C, brrrrr.

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For some reason they didn’t add concrete all the way to the edges, probably something we should have discussed beforehand. Anyway we filled in these areas this weekend and are misting the concrete to improve the cure. There are some areas where you can see some deviations in height but overall it appears pretty flat and we’re happy with the results.

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In about a month, when the concrete is fully cured, we will apply a coat of epoxy, probably colored, to add some protection and to smooth out any imperfections, but this is only if we can warm up the area to about 50° which is doubtful. Maybe we can install the rest of the radiant heating system, that would be cosy 🙂

Here’s more on the history of concrete, for all you nerds.

12/11/202112/11/2021

Something is a stirring at Disaster Mansion

As I speak something is a stirring at Disaster Mansion and Aimee and I are very excited. Check back later for details.

05/11/202113/01/2022

Inspection complete

This morning we had our pre-pour inspection with Dave from the city and thankfully we passed. We’ve let our concrete guy, Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry), know and he is going to try and fit us in next week, currently there seems to be a shortage of concrete, but fingers crossed.

Temperatures are now starting to hit freezing but I feel we can combat that with a few electric space heaters but once we start to drop to about 10° below there would be no chance of that as our house is far from air tight with broken and boarded up windows etc.

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The prep work for this has been a huge job for us so I’m glad we have finally finished.

01/11/202106/11/2021

And the results are in, probably…

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I started the test at about 1.30pm yesterday with a shade over 75psi and today at 8.30pm (30 hour time lapse) the pressure is at 71psi. I’m hoping the drop is due to colder temperatures than yesterday and pipe expansion. I’ll leave the system like this over the next few days and monitor. Fingers crossed.

I did mean to put a clock behind the gauge but I forgot so the video doesn’t have many moving parts!

P.S. We have our inspection this Friday so really hoping we get the thumbs up.

Updates

Nov 1st update. 70 psi (52 hour time lapse). Still putting this down to colder temperatures.
Nov 2nd update. 69 psi (58 hour time lapse). Maybe we do have a slow leak. I’ll spray all the connectors with soapy water tomorrow.
Nov 3rd update. 65 psi (80 hour time lapse). Sprayed all the connections with soapy water and found one tiny leak so tighten up that one connector and charged the system to 80 psi.
Nov 4th update. 78 – 79 psi (104 hour time lapse) which for now I’ll put down to pipe expansion.
Nov 5th update. 78 – 79 psi (138 hour time lapse) hopefully holding steady.

31/10/202131/10/2021

Under pressure

Bought an air inflator today and started pressure testing the pex system. There were a few obvious leaks and they were fixed by tightening some fitting. Pressurised the system to 75 psi which is a lot more than the operating pressure but is what’s recommended. I’ll check back tomorrow and fingers crossed it will be at the same pressure give or take a few psi to account for changes in ambient temperature and pipe expansion.

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I’ll update this post tomorrow evening with the results. Fingers crossed.

30/10/202130/10/2021

Radiant heating pex installed

Glad to say that the radiant heating pex has finally been completed and connected to the manifold. I was hoping to pressure test the system this evening but our inflator only has a cigarette style power input.

What took us so long was the transition from the main room into the boiler room which is about 12″ higher. The pipes have to be concealed in the 12″ wall as well as being insulated so they don’t loose heat to the ground. I’ve been trying to work how to do this for ages and my first solution (last image) was a plywood step with insulation below it. That didn’t work as it exceeded the bend radius of the pex and it was kinking. Kinks are not good as it restricts the flow of water, however, a great advantage of PEX A is that you can restore the pex to its original shape with a heat gun. That saved my bacon a couple of times and you can see a demo below.

Second attempt at a step was a success, similar plywood step, but this one had the foam insulation glued to the top so I could carve it into a slow “S”. I also added three rows some great pex clips to hold the tubing in place and they worked a treat. I filled up some of the gaps with expanding foam and in the next couple of days I will concrete this up. All in all I’m pretty pleased with how this went.

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To connect the pex to the manifold you have to use a special and expensive tool (about $600) which expands the pex. Luckily our friend John Paul lent us his. It’s pretty cool how it works and I recommend this video.

Tomorrow I will try and pressure test the system and if that is a success then we can get an inspection from the local building department.

It’s a real shame my parents and Aimee’s Dad aren’t still with us as I think they would have got a thrill from all of this.

21/10/202121/10/2021

Pour in a week or so

Spoke to our concrete guy, Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry), a few weeks and he said he could get the pour within a few days of us getting a pre-pour inspection. We’re over the moon with this news as the construction industry is booming in the Hudson valley due to an influx of people from New York city and a lot of contractors are booked up till next year, plus prices have gone way up due to the bad state of the supply chain.

Concrete needs a temperature of 50° or above to cure properly and if you don’t hit this range for 24 hours then the concrete looses a substantial amount of strength, hence why we are anxious to get it done before winter. Al seemed pretty impressed with our prep work and semi-seriously asked us if we wanted to do some more prep work for him, nice of him to say that.

The concrete I had to remove from the footing probably took me about 30 hours in total (over a few weekends and many evening) and I’m really glad that is over. In total I removed about 5″ from the top of the footing. These were additional footings that I added and they were at least 18″ deep so even with the 5″ removed there is a still a substantial amount left. Lesson learnt.

We are now at the point of laying down our pex tubing for the radiant heating. We have most of the parts and have worked out the layout of the loops will go. It was great talking to our friend John Paul who suggested that we just have one zone for the ground floor. Zones allow you to customize your heating, for example you may want your bathroom warmer to drive away condensation, while you may want your bedroom cooler. John Paul said that as the ground floor is so small zoning wouldn’t be that useful, hence we have one zone which will consist of four loops (bedroom, bathroom and two for the main room). In addition the manifold (used to connect all the tubes in the slab to a hot water supply) will have balance valves so we can achieve the effect of zones by tweaking these if we need to.

We went with the Uponor brand (they have great Youtube videos and have been in the business since the beginning of PEX) for our supplies . Incidentally, John Paul, went with Uponor for his new house and if it’s good enough for John Paul it’s good enough for us. The nice thing about the Uponor tubing (Pex type A) is that if you kink it by bending it too much then you can remove the kink with a heat gun and the pex is as good as new and we did kink it twice.

We weren’t happy with the pex layout in the bedroom so re-did, didn’t take long, an hour max. See before and after pictures below.

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Next steps is to sort out the pex as it transitions up 10″ into the boiler room. That’s going to take some thought to do it nicely as it needs to be hidden after the pour, plus insulated. After that we can start working assembling and attaching the pex to the manifold and pressure test the system.

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You’ll note that in cold areas (exterior walls and the front door) the pex spacing is halved to give those regions a bit more warmth. I think we used over a 1000 zip ties to attach the pex to the rebar mesh, which will all get cut back so they don’t stick out of the concrete.

12/10/202123/12/2021

Prepping for parging

Apart form the concrete pour, another task we are trying to get done before it gets too cold is to apply a parge coat/plastering of lime mortar to our outside walls, reason being we are fed up of the huge trenches and not being able to walk around our house. The old mortar has flaked off and as we had new footings added to the rear walls it meant that the normally sub-terrain walls were fully exposed. Alas we were busy doing other tasks so over the last year or so three foot of sandy sold has been washed back against the back wall.

This weekend we started to dig out the sediment. It’s too steep to wheel barrow so it was shoveling into buckets. We did hire a friend of ours to help us out but he bailed after about 1 & 1/2 hours, shame. We have, however, enlisted the help of some other friends Cari and George.

As we dig, more soil collapses back into the trench. It’s annoying as you think you have finished and then bam, another couple of wheel barrows needs to be removed, but I hoping that once the soil reaches an angle of 60 – 70° it will become stable.

We don’t have any video of Georges work but he’s made good progress, again more land slides after he left but we’ll remove them.

After some research it looks like we may need three coats of lime mortar, a first or bonding coat which is usually thrown on, then a scratch coat (called a scratch coat as it’s usually scratched or scored with a comb to give it a rough texture). followed by a finish coat, with each coat getting progressively thinner. Unfortunately each coat takes about a week to partially cure before the next coat can be applied, so it looks like we won’t have enough time this year. Bit of a shame as we really wanted to fill in these damn trenches around the house.

We will complete the digging out this year and then and add tarps so the bank doesn’t get washed down again and then wait for spring, which here is April/May.

07/10/202107/10/2021

Look familiar?

Our neighbour down the street in Ponckhockie received this flyer through the mail.

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At first I thought it was a water colour but we were told by a friend that this was done using a standard photoshop filter.

07/09/202108/09/2021

Inching closer to the pour

We continue to prepare for the ground floor pour. Seems like we have been doing this for months which is probably not far from the truth. If you had asked me, before we started, how long I thought it would would take I would have said about three weeks, dig out and level basement dirt, add 5 – 6″ of gravel and compact, add vapour barrier, foam insulation, rebar and radiant heating – easy! I should know better by now and multiply all estimates by four or five.

Most of the delays have been spent working around our irregular footings and that has involved a lot of trimming with grinder, hammer drill and chisel etc. If this was a new build we wouldn’t have these problems as everything would be square and at the same height. Even after tidying up the footings they still aren’t square, straight or at the same height so accurately cutting and taping the vapour barrier and foam insulation is more time consuming than I thought. Like a lot of things in the house this is a first for ourselves so we are taking our time and trying to do it right. We have made a few mistakes like getting the levels wrong in bedroom which meant we had to remove a few inches of gravel – annoying as we had finished putting down the vapour barrier and insulations.

After the gravel was compacted we started laying down the vapour barrier, we were going to put the vapor barrier above the foam but the local building inspector recommended it go below the foam so that’s where it went. We had previously bought some 6 mil polyethylene sheet for this purpose but after some research 6 mil seems to be about the bare minimum so we bought some StegoHome 10-Mil Vapor Retarder which is a lot thicker and comes in a cool color. The red Stego tape is really great also, super sticky. I’d like to thank Mariah of Stego Industries who has been most helpful and patient with us. Thank you Mariah!!

As we had the 6 mil sheet anyway I decided to put that down first as it helped stop us kicking up the compacted gravel as we walked over it. We also wrapped the vapour barrier up the walls a bit – seemed like a good idea especially where the rear walls are build into the earth and subject to damp.

With the vapour barrier pretty much down so we’ve started to add the 2″ foam insulation sheets and we feel we’ve done a pretty decent job with most of the foam joints being nice and tight. Eventually these will all get taped up.

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After the main floor insulation we needed to run the foam insulation up the sides of the walls by about 4 to 5″. This acts as a thermal barrier so our heated slab doesn’t end up loosing heat to the footings and outside walls. It was during this process that I discovered more concrete that had to be removed – there goes another three evenings! In the photos below the green laser line is the finished floor level and if I hadn’t removed the concrete above that we would have had a ledge in the bedroom which would have meant that you couldn’t push furniture up against the wall. In the end I went down 1″ below the laser line – I’m getting pretty good with the hammer and chisel 🙂

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Below you can see the beveled foam edging which I cut with my track saw. The foam will be about 1/2″ below the finished floor so you’ll never see it. It’s glued down with a construction adhesive.

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Finally a room with the rebar mesh laid down and zip tied together. On top of this I’ll zip tie the radiant heating pex tubing but first I need to finish off the edge insulation in the other rooms.

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I’ll be really glad when this job is over and we have a concrete floor. This might be the biggest job we’ve tackled so far.