Disaster Mansion

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.

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!!!!

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 🙂