As I speak something is a stirring at Disaster Mansion and Aimee and I are very excited. Check back later for details.
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.
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 🙂
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
Someone dumped some gravel…
We’re not sure who put it there, but the plot thickens.
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!!!!
Basement dig
We’re getting close to getting a basement pour and to save some money we are excavating it ourselves. On average we’ve removed about 8″ deep of soil which will allow for 5″ of gravel, 2″ of insulating foam and 4″ of concrete. It will have probably taken us about 16 hours in total to remove this dirt, spread over a weekend and a few evenings, hard work but we take lots of rests, plus the dirts is basically sand. Main problem is where to put the dirt and the front of our house is starting to look like a scale model of the Himalayas. The dirt isn’t going back into the house, so what to do with it? Feel free to help yourself.
One good thing about this new pour is that we’re gaining 4 – 5″ of extra height in the basement. The ceilings will still be a little low but not as low as they used to be. To achieve this we did had to cut some of our footings down by a few inches which wasn’t an easy job and required a diamond cutting blade on my grinder and a hammer drill. That job probably took another few weekends and evenings, annoying as I added this extra concrete in the first place!! The footings still go down another 14″ so not loss of strength.
We’ll pay someone to do the pour, though at one point we were seriously thinking of doing it ourselves, with the help of course from people who have some expertise in this, mainly Derrick, John Paul and Joe. If this was all we had to do on the house then I’m pretty sure we would have done it ourselves.
We still have a few little jobs to do before we’ll be ready and these include laying an electrical conduit for the mains cable, drilling holes through the wall into our mechanical room for our radiant heating pipes and lastly we’ll need to remove the staircase. We’ll probably keep just the hand rail and the newal post and bin the rest. Making a new stair case shouldn’t be too hard and should be a fun project 🙂
Finally finished with the support posts
Not a very exciting post, just finishing off the work we started here, Thanks Mary.
We did a really nice job on the right most post, four pressure treated 2×10’s, planed (including hand planing), glued, bolted together and then all the holes and dents filled with epoxy paste. Result is a nice post which looks like a ye olde piece of timber which we’ll paint to hide the not so old epoxied bolt holes. The post of the left will be hidden within our six inches or so of insulation, so no need to make it look fancy.
We’ll use these two pillars to build a little alcove for when you come in which will house a bench and somewhere to hang your coats. I think we’re both looking forward to when we can work on these design features. For the immediate future it’s still heavy lifting.
The mud room
I’m not sure sure what this room was ever used for, it had a small slit of a window and a soil floor. In our redesign we’ve dropped the floor a bit to match the rest of the ground floor and added a couple of windows. This room also needs to be split into two, a small bedroom and a mechanical/boiler room with room for a washer, dryer and slop sink.
It’s a shame that the bedroom will be smallish as when this floor is complete we’ll be living here for a good few years while we fix up the rest of the house. That said, small can be cosy. We’ll be creative with our use of space and I’ll be reaching out to my brother Matthew who has been devising some clever under the stairs pullout storage systems. Aimee who used to live in New York city says that compared to the housing there, our ground floor apartment would be viewed as pretty spacious.
Our friend and advisor Derrick suggested that this partition wall could also be load bearing to help support the long ceiling span above, which makes total sense and is why we put this decent footing down, complete with rebar. Derrick is the best.
Due to the footings, the floor of the mechanical room will be higher than the rest of the ground floor by about 6 inches, hence why we added a single layer of concrete blocks. Our experience with bricklaying is next to zero so we made a bit of a mess out of it and resorted to pushing in cement with our fingers, that said the end result was pretty good, plus it’s straight and pretty level.
As temperatures are getting pretty low I covered up the concrete in a plastic tent with a small heater which we kept on overnight. The following day we drilled down through every other block so we could hammer in 10″ sections of rebar which we in-filled with concrete and topped off with a nice smooth mortar – was the rebar and in-fill needed, not sure, but now those blocks aren’t going anywhere. By the way the Makita hammer drill makes light work of the holes, not sure who made the 1/2″ drill bit but but probably Milwaukee or Bosch.
Thanks Mary …
Winter is coming and we’re scrambling to get a bunch of tasks done before it gets too cold. Our house has little protection from the cold which from a comfort point of view can fixed by wearing three pairs of socks, leggings and two pairs of gloves etc. but what you can’t do is change the chemical properties of cement, paints or glues which really can’t be used when temperatures approach freezing.
These last couple of weekends we’ve worked on replacing the last of our new pillars blocks which were already cracking and starting to subside. This is a link to the first pillar block we replaced back in May this year.
Once we have these new blocks in place we’ll only need a bit more plumbing and some electrical lines put down before we can fill in all the trenches and start to prep for a concrete pour in the spring.
When we replace a pillar support we first have to remove the existing pillar which is always a little nerve racking as these pillars are holding up a decent portion of the house. To prevent any damage to the house we add temporary bracing which as this is second time around, we’re a bit more comfortable doing it. It’s a bit of a struggle to get the temporary bracing in place and often involves some good choice words.
Like the first pillar block we’re using old cast iron railroad screw jacks which are perfect for the job. In case you’re wondering why they’re sitting in holes, it’s because the soil is pretty much sand and if we had placed them on top, then when we excavated for the new pillar blocks there’d be a good chance that the soil beneath the jacks, especially under load, would have caved in and that wouldn’t be good.
For the third block we also had the chance to continue our efforts at beefing up the existing footings. In places you could put your hand maybe 8″ under the walls so it was nice to get all this sorted out. We tied this new pour into the existing footings with epoxied rebar.
Would you believe it, no sooner had we finished the pour some one tagged it, thanks Mary, if that’s even your real name.
