This Sunday we got the crew together to do another self leveling pour. The original plan was to do an initial pour to fill in all the deep areas and then a second finishing pour. Well I underestimated the number of bags for the first pour (17 bags ≈ $700) so we didn’t manage to fill in all the deep areas, worse than that after checking the levels with a laser, the deep areas still needed at least 1/2″ of product. This was poor planning on my part and I decided that I needed was some sort of depth gauge to give you some visual indication of how much leveler a particular spot on the floor required.
I looked about a bit and eventually found these handy self leveling pins. They have adhesive on the bottom, so I placed them every 3′ to 4′, set up the laser level and then cut them down to the height of the laser line. They did the a great job though they were pretty expensive at $120 for a box of 250, however, we only used about 40 so I’ll sell the rest.
For this weekend we had 51 bags (≈ $2,100) and I decided to do the whole main room – for self leveling that’s quite a large area. I damned off the bedroom as we needed somewhere to mix.
The results weren’t perfect:
It was a hot day and the product set fast. Next time I’ll ice the water.
I tried to move the product after it had started to set and caused some unsightly blemishes.
We had some leaks where the product was draining into our sub-slab gravel.
We ran out of product and didn’t cover the entire area.
That said we will do another final skim coat which will hide all these minor blemishes.
By the way I’m wearing spiked shoes so I can walk over the product without messing it up, pretty damn slippery though.
In the photos you will see a lot of lines on the floor, these are the boundaries of each batch we poured, however, these are smooth so no ridge, just change in color. The final pour should be pretty straight forward and all the different batches will be blended in with the spiked roller, after which we will probably apply a protective epoxy coating.
The photos don’t do it justice and I’m pretty pleased with how this pour went, apart from the odd blemishes (which will be covered in the final pour) it’s finally getting nice and flat. Again a big thanks to Joe, Deborah, Brian, Rob and Aimee.
Harling is the process of throwing a lime slurry onto a wall. I’m guessing the name derived from the word hurl. We’re doing this to replace the flaking lime render on our walls. Lime mortar walls are porous and I believe it’s normal for the surfaces to flake like this over time. These walls probably haven’t been touched in 150 years so they deserve a little love. The harl coat isn’t a finish coat, rather it provides a good textured coat for subsequent coats. As we will be framing out the downstairs to add insulation we will leave the majority of the walls with just this harl coat. Only internal walls will have finishing coats.
It’s a bit of a messy and physical job with lots of the lime ending up on the floor. You have to wear eye protection as the lime is pretty caustic and will burn. Mixing lime is also pretty time consuming as a batch will take a minimum of twenty minutes to mix. Lucky our friends John Paul and Joe and Deborah both lent us decent mixers which made the process a lot easier.
For the mixing process you have to dry mix the sand and Natural Hydraulic Lime 3.5 (we buy ours from the fine people at Limeworks) for 5 minutes, add water and then mix for a further twenty minutes to make the render more workable or ‘fatter’.
We are thinking of buying or hiring something like the Render Gun for the harl coat and pay someone to do the finish coat.
If you remember last year we had a concrete pour that didn’t go so well. Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry) admitted it wasn’t acceptable but wouldn’t fix it. We could have left it as it was but I felt that it might cause problems in the long term and if we were going to level it, now was the time.
Unfortunately for us we couldn’t fix it until now as self-leveling concrete can’t be used when it’s cold. It’s now warm enough, so today we took a stab at it. I wouldn’t say it’s a hard job but you have to be prepared. I’ve been watching youtube video and reading up about it since last year, but I was still a little nervous as most of these products have a very short flow time (10 minutes in our case). Luckily it went well, I had all the tools, buckets, product lined up etc. but most importantly I had a great team of volunteers helping me, so a big shout out to Joe, Deborah, Rob and Aimee. Every one was assigned a different task and everyone preformed flawlessly.
Music was requested by Joe.
My goal was to fix the floor in two passes, first pass was to fill in all the deep areas (shown as the darker areas in he contour map) and the second pass was to cover the complete floor with a final skim coat, re-priming between coats. My only mistake was not ordering enough product. I ordered 17, 40lb. bags of Henry 565 ($40 a bag, so not cheap) and I thought that would be enough – no where near and I think it covered about half of the first pass. I just ordered another 46 bags so hopefully that will be enough. Thanks for picking it up Joe 🙂
Even though we didn’t get as much done today as I expected it was a great trial run and everyone now knows what their tasks are and are willing to help us again. Incidentally all the mixing and product were laid down in under an hour, which was pretty quick. I think we all felt we could have easily have managed twice or three times that amount.
Returning to examine the floor on Sunday we noticed some wrinkling in some areas. Not sure what caused this but will ask the manufactures if they know. Second picture shows how it should look, nice and smooth.
Last weekend was wet but this weekend was perfect and I finished removing all the dirt from behind the back of the house. It was a pretty hard job throwing the dirt out of the trench especially as the trench kept on collapsing. I did get bonked on the head when some large stones at the end of the trench decided to fall when I was bending over but no blood and and all is good. Shuttering isn’t great, but will hopefully hold up for a little while.
Next step is to remove any loose mortar on the wall, wash it down thoroughly and then we’ll pay someone to parge it, after which we can install a french drain, fill the trench back in and get our path around the house back This has been a big job and we’ll both be pleased when it’s over.
Not the most interesting of posts, I keep thinking I’ll dig up something interesting but also no.
We’re slowly coming out of hibernation here. In previous years you’d often find us working in freezing conditions, but now those days are thinner on the ground.
We are making progress on the house but we still have some major tasks to do and one of them is to apply a new lime parge coat to the exterior walls, install a french drain and then fill up the trenches around our house so it’s not an assault course.
Clearing out the back wall has been most tricky as the bank keeps on collapsing and everything has to be carried out by bucket. Luckily I had a guest appearance from my brother Matthew and we made a decent dent in the job. We’ll continue this job as the weather improves.
In other parts of the house we have been prepping to get the floor level but this been delayed due to the cold as the concrete slab and ambient temperature needs to be above 50°F/10°C, fortunately those temperatures are fast approaching and once we have a flat floor we can begin framing it out internally for walls and insulation.
This is the wall between bedroom and boiler room, it’s not a priority but this can be done during these cold months. Our friend Derrick suggested that this could also be a load bearing wall to give the floor above a bit more support, hence the 4×4 studs under each floor joist. This will also give us a solid structure should we ever need to mount anything on the walls of the boiler room.
For purely aesthetic reasons I notched the studs for the horizontal braces (blocking). Currently the braces are loose, but I will secure them with a pocket screw. The wall is probably a bit over engineered, but that doesn’t bother me.
Whilst this has be going on Aimee has been removing hundreds of screws and nails from the floor joists and generally clearing away thick layer of dust and debris that has built up over the years.
I still have add the end studs but I think I’ll leave that until we know how much equipment needs to go into the boiler room, if not much then I may use the slot on the right to make a smallish built in closet for the bedroom, we’ll see. Really trying to maximise every inch of this place.
So the novelty of working in near freezing conditions is wearing off a bit, even our tools don’t work well when it gets that cold, example being our planer, the rubber rollers harden and lose their grip and can’t feed the wood through. This weekend it will hit a balmy 1°F/-17°C and it’s not much different inside the house.
After years of working on the house, evenings and weekends, I find myself at a bit of a loss as to what to do, so I’m trying to think of projects that can be done in the comfort of our kitchen and the first project that I’ve been working on is restoring the the newel post which is the large post at the bottom of a staircase. We will probably junk most of the stair case so it’s nice to keep at least some original parts.
This post has been pretty abused over the years but I hope to restore her to some former glory. I suspect the post originally came from another house as it had been painting white and had period fixes (square nails). This post was on the ground floor so it doesn’t need to be perfect. The bottom was resting on soil and is pretty rotten so I’ll chop that off and add a new section.
Every night, after work, I’ll crack a beer and start scraping and sanding. I use Bahco scrapers with their carbide blades and they are great. You have to be aware of the grain of the wood and apply light pressure. As for sanding I’m loving these flexible 3M sanding sheets which seem to last and last.
Tonight I removed a pretty decent sized dent from the post by using a steam iron, lots of videos on youtube but this one is pretty good. I spent about ten minutes and I think I got about 80 – 90% of the dent out which is good enough for me.
After sanding I filled the many small dings and dents with West epoxy, then applied a dark walnut stain before adding a few light coats of satin polyurethane. I’ll probably sand back lightly and then apply a couple more coats. It’s not perfect, but I’m happy with it. Eventually I’ll replace the rotten wood at the end.
Another project is to clean up the basement joists. The joists have hundreds of old nails in them (which we are removing) and are littered with the old knob and tube style of wiring. Not sure whether this wiring is original to the house as there is evidence of gas lamps upstairs. Interesting article from Goshow Architects in which they talk about the pros and cons of K & T wiring.
I may try and remove some of the knobs without damaging them and use them for cabinet handles etc. as per these Pinterest ideas. Currently they are a bit of a pain to remove without breaking them.
Lastly I’ve been milling wood for our sash windows. A while back we got this great thermally modified wood which is very rot resistant, unfortunately it isn’t thick enough so I’ve had to run it through the table saw, jointer and planer before I can epoxy the pieces together and after all that I still need to run it through the planer and table saw again. It’s a bit of a faff, especially as each window requires ten finished pieces. Next time I’ll find some thicker lumber. I can recommend the Bora clamps, they do need a really strong grip to open, but your hands strengthen up.
As the end of the year draws nigh, I’d like to recap on what we’ve been up to over the year, highlighting any highs and lows.
January
We started the year well with a generous donation of brass window hardware from the Architectural Resource Center in New Hampshire. Thank you Bob that was extremely generous and it was a big ray of sunshine that we needed badly.
In February we restored some drafting chairs which we picked up for a decent price. They didn’t look great with dents and gouges and supposedly one of the chairs was missing some parts – turned out to be a spring which I replaced for less than a dollar. We removed all the old paint, filled in all the gouges etc. and then stained the wood. All in all they turned out pretty good and will serve us for many years.
In March we picked up a lovely old Craftsman drill press built around the late 1930’s. This will probably see us both out! There is something in these old tools that feels most pleasing, visually and functionally.
With spring in full swing we planted a Magnolia tree and named it “Big Nan” after my grandmother. Aimee had a Magnolia tree when she was young and so did Big Nan! It’s probably grown 9″ since we planted it and had some nice blossoms.
We finished off April with prep work for the ground floor pour. First steps were to remove a huge amount of sandy soil and rather too much chiseling away of footings – glad that job is over.
We started the month off with a huge load of gravel for the basement. We had two loads delivered and in total we shifted about 20 tons of the stuff in the wheel barrow, that took a good few weekends and evenings. In the process we removed the staircase so it wouldn’t get in the way of the pour. Prior to the gravel we dug trenches and installed some electrical conduit so after the pour we could thread the power lines into the electrical room.
I ordered a bit too much gravel so I decided to lay down some footings for a small patio wall in front of the house. Digging the trench was a bit of a pain as we had already dumped about 3′ of soil from the basement on it so the trench needed to be about 4′ deep. Anyway that got rid of some of the gravel, the rest we will use in our french drains. In addition this footing will be used to dump any excess concrete from the pour – no point in wasting it.
We followed this by leveling the gravel (to within +/- 1/8″ – it took us about a week to do this) and then hired a compactor for the day to compact it.
Decided to lay some concrete for the patio footings as we wouldn’t have that much spare from the pour and also because soil was starting to fall in etc.
This month was all about pour prep, we had to cut back a lot more of the footings but eventually got the vapour barrier and foam insulation down and started to put down the rebar mesh.
I happened to share the time lapse of us installing our Stego vapour barrier with the nice folks at Stego Industries and in response Dave Kartunen, Media Consultant at Stego, came to video interview us. Lovely chap supporting a great product. Can’t wait to see the final interview.
In preparation for the pour we had our work inspected by the local building inspector and it passed. We waited for a few weeks and Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry) finally managed to do the pour. We were thankful as it was starting to get cold and concrete doesn’t like the cold.
After it had cured we noticed that they hadn’t gone all the way to the walls, odd I thought but we patched that up. I then began to notice that some areas seemed uneven so we took some random measurements and found a height deviation of 1 & 3/8″ (later revised to 1 & 1/18″).
To get a better idea of what was going on with the floor I divided it into a 2′ grid and with the help of friends, Paul and Sue, took depth readings, you can see the results in this post.
I exchanged a few emails with Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry), but at the end of the day he didn’t seem to want to fix it even though he said that 1 & 1/8″ was unacceptable. His argument was that the pour was over 4 & 1/2″ deep (as stated in our first contract) and it was, it was probably 4 & 3/4″ and this was caused by the compaction of the gravel. Al Riozzi did note this two weeks before the pour and he also commented on it on the day of the pour, saying he would have to order extra concrete, so there shouldn’t have been any surprises there. To cut a long story short Al Riozzi and his team underestimated the amount of concrete and just tried to blend away the difference and then tried to blame it on us. Watch the video of them laying it, they aren’t even checking the depth against their laser.
We were very disappointed that Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry) didn’t have the integrity to admit his mistake and fix the issue. We spent months prepping the basement and I think we did a very good job, all to be spoilt by shoddy and amateurish work in half a day. I would not recommend this Saugerties based contractor whatsoever. Something is broken in this world.
It’s getting pretty cold here and I have to say that our enthusiasm for the project is flagging. I’m still finding projects that I can do at our apartment such as restore our old basement bannister post and mill wood for our sash windows.
So in reflection we started the year off on a high with the generous support from Bob at the Architectural Resource Center and Stego Industries and are unfortunately leaving it on a low with the poor workmanship of Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry). We’re doing the best we can but it’s getting harder to bounce back from knocks.
Here’s to a healthy, peaceful and cheerful 2022 to all of you that have been following our progress. I special call out to Chris and Ian who are constantly giving us positive feedback – thank you, it means a lot.
With the help of old college friends, Paul and Sue, we surveyed the height of the ground floor. I was taking samples every foot, but that was taking too much time so I enlarged to a 2′ grid. Using Surfer, a plotting app, I was able to produce the following contour map (contours are at 1/16″ increments and the higher the number the lower the floor is). Although it might not be obvious from this chart, the largest deviation we found was 1 & 1/8″ (not 1 & 3/8″ that I mentioned in a earlier post).
We’ve just reached out to Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry), who we hired for the pour and look forward to his reply. Researching into a solution, looks like our only option is to use a self leveling compound, though you have to be quick and have a decent sized crew to help mix and pour as you only have about 20 minutes working time.
If you look at the contour map, you’ll see low spots top left, bottom left and top right so we may be able to three separate pours of the self leveling compound and live with the slight deviation in the center.
This is an amusing video on the pitfalls of self leveling compound, How not to level a floor, though my brother Ian did point out that the chap isn’t laughing.
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