David Linnard - Disaster Mansion

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.

02/08/202102/08/2021

Patio wall footing

As it was nice weather this weekend we decided to start mixing the concrete for our patio wall. We finished a 12′ section yesterday and today we finished the rest of the left hand side. It took seven trips to the hardware store to pick up concrete as we can’t carry too much in a salon car, at 60 or 80lbs a bag it soon adds up. I think we used just over 30 bags to get this work done and we finished just as it was starting to rain, good timing. Concrete ended up being about 5″ thick and we did add 3/8″ rebar. We’ll leave the right side empty in case we have any excess concrete from the pour.

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Inside we’ve been laying the insulation foam down and I’ve spent quite a bit of time cutting back the uneven footings a few inches so that the foam boards fits well. It’s not work I enjoy as it’s uncomfortable, noisy and dusty but I think worth doing. In one of the photos below you can see the marks some insects have made in the dust – I suspect the large tracks are from a centipede. We’re cutting the foam with a combination of Makita track saw, Japanese hand saw and a sharp bladed utility knife.

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This week we have the Kingston building inspector coming around to look at our pre-pour work so it will be interesting to see what he says.

26/07/202126/07/2021

Front patio wall

First I didn’t order enough gravel for the ground floor and then I ordered too much. To find a home for it we decided to build a footing for our front patio wall. Digging was the worst part as the ground here is 3′ higher than it should be due to ground floor excavation. With the forms laid we added maybe 5″ of gravel onto which we’ll add 4 – 5″ of concrete with rebar. This is a fun project (and not high priority), but having these footings ready will be useful for when we have the concrete pour as if there is any excess concrete it can be dumped in here. It doesn’t matter that the forms aren’t perfectly straight as this concrete footing will be just below the surface.

The wall won’t be very high at all, maybe six inches max and on top of it we will use local bluestone which we’ve been collecting over the last couple of years. Not sure whether we will go with rectangular or irregular stones (see sample images), it will probably depend on what we have.

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Our vision for this patio is to have a nice shaded area to sit out on with a selection of plants in large terracotta planters etc. In front of the patio we thought we’d have a large flower bed stretching the width of the patio with climbing roses going up the balcony supports.

The front of the house has looked messy for a long time so it will be great to tidy it up. The neighbours all say the place looks a lot better and we’ll take that.

20/07/202121/07/2021

Compaction, compaction, compaction

This weekend we started the compaction of our gravel. Big thanks to Don the Johnson who picked up the compactor for us and then went off with Aimee to buy 25 sheets of 4’x8′ x 2″ foam board, 100′ of rebar and 32 sheets of rebar mesh. Bill for that was $1,500 and luckily the price of foam had dropped by $10 a board from the previous week – Covid. What a great help you were Don, big thanks.

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So we needed the plate compactor to compact the gravel and to help stop the gravel settling over time. I found this quote from Braen Stone:

Although there are certain scenarios in which stone will tend to naturally compact or hold its place, many materials will begin to settle over time. When this happens, the surface becomes uneven, resulting in the development of gaps, dips and holes

The weakened surface results in unsafe conditions and costly repairs. The only way to prevent these problems from arising is by investing the time in stone compaction. This will create a solid base or sub-base that will hold its form and add to the life and value of your project.

It took Aimee a full afternoon compacting the gravel in the three ground floor rooms and after compaction the gravel had settled by about 3/4″. The finished result does look great, flat, level and pretty smooth. Next step will be laying out the foam insulation, followed by a Stego 10 mil vapour barrier, rebar mesh and radiant heat tubing.

We hired the plate compactor (heavy bugger) from Equipment Rentals NY and had to return it by 7.30am, so a big thank you to George, our neighbour, who met us at DM at 7am with his truck as it won’t fit in our sedan car. One day we will buy some sort of truck or SUV.

12/07/202111/12/2021

[spfx: waving stick around] Gravelus be gonus

Well it was worth a try.

Over the last week we’ve been moving gravel into the ground floor to form a sub-base for the concrete pour. I ordered about 13 cubic yards which equates to about 14 tons in weight. Weather conditions haven’t been ideal as the last weekend we had temperatures in the high nineties with 100% humidity. Now that heat wave has been broken it’s wet.

We’re aiming for about 5″ – 6″ of gravel which we’re leveling with a laser level. Once we get it pretty flat we’ll hire a compactor to settle the gravel and then start on the next layers which will be 2″ of foam insulation and a vapor barrier (plastic sheet). We’ll pay someone to do the actual pour but we’ll likely lay down the rebar mesh and the radiant heating pipework, subject to a bit of reading up.

We were a bit short on the gravel so we ordered 3 cubic yards more and now we have too much. To get rid of it I’ve dug a trench which will be used for a small supporting wall for a stone patio and I’ll use the gravel as a sub-base for that pour.

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If you watched the video in it’s full you may have spotted a guest appearance from our cute little car. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which car it is. In case you’re wondering what we are doing at the end of the video we are washing the gravel over a sieve as it was mixed with dirt – like father, like son.

23/06/202123/06/2021

Someone dumped some gravel…

We’re not sure who put it there, but the plot thickens.

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Yes it’s our gravel and it will form the sub-base for the concrete ground floor. We ordered 13 cubic yards (about 17 tons) and this should be enough to give us a 5″ – 6″ layer of gravel, main purpose of which is for drainage under the slab.

Shifting it will keep us busy but I think we’ll have it all done by the following weekend. My Dad used to order huge piles of soil, gravel, sand etc. so I’m used to the mental stamina required in moving it! Anyone fancy a workout?

I have to say that we were pretty impressed with the supplier, Denter Sand & Gravel. We ordered lunchtime and when we got to the house this evening it was already there!!!!