Floor Pour Complete

Saturday dawned bright and early, 5:45AM to be precise. It was the last pour for the concrete floors.

The upstairs floor has been ready to pour for a while but with a busy summer for our fantastic concrete guru, Tim Crews of Precision Concrete, we left it to him to pour whenever he got the chance and Saturday was the "go" day.

We had kept the upper containers covered with tarps on the end after we installed the radiant tubing to keep the western sun off the plastic. We knew the pour would be a tad tricky as it was an enclosed space with no stair access. The guys went up and down via ladders at the end with a dedicated ladder for the pump hose and our scaffolding on the south side of the containers.

                                      

Tim had to use a concrete company called Livingston's who were further away as the upstairs containers required a lightweight concrete mix, a specialty our local concrete provider wasn't able to get for us. What makes it lightweight is the different aggregate that is used. Rather than local stone or pea gravel they use pumice rock or lava stone. It is a porous stone that was soaked in water overnight to absorb all the water it could before being added to the mix. If it hadn't been it would have absorbed all the water in the mix resulting in too dry a mix. Concrete is so interesting. 

We had Tim, of Precision Concrete, his dad Jim, brother Dustin and Jesus was back - YEH!!!! Pumper Dude Ed and Rob were also on the scene.

It went pretty fast but this concrete mix was definitely different from what the guys were used to pouring and it has a green tinge to it, actually not bad looking by itself.

  

Things got a tad tight as they got to the end and concreted themselves into a corner.

We put the zip strips in again so that when the concrete cracks (which it will) it will follow the zip strip and stay pretty straight, for the most part.

It got cozy with all the boys snugged up into the corner. Fortunately that is the west wall so the sun didn't hit all morning while they were working.

The concrete around my porthole laundry shoot....can't wait to get that installed.

Jesus and Tim above and below handling the zip strips.

All done, they had to wait longer than normal before they could get back on it with the knee floats to trowel out the surface. 

Jesus and his helper troweling out the surface. Then we put the tarps back down to keep the sun off of it while it continued to dry. The sun will dry it out to fast and the heat will cause excess cracking so we went back and watered it down later on to slow the curing process. 

We were all finished by about 12:30PM which was nice because it was a hot one. It was kind of sad because this is probably the last time we will have the whole concrete team here. There are the exterior concrete paths and porch to pour but I think those are pretty easy to do and don't require the whole team.

Pumper Ed and Rob will be back next week though when we pour the first floor of the ICF walls so that will be great. 

This week we are trying to get the trenches done around the house for the gas line, water line, sewer line and electric. 

Keep pushing onwards. 

Ups and Downs of Staining Concrete

Since before we poured the first floor concrete I started experimenting with stain for the final concrete floor. I practiced on the crawl space floor, the foundation wall, the old slab in front of the workshop, pretty much any concrete I could get near got a taste of my staining expertise, or lack thereof.

After a little research I found out that you can use iron sulfate to stain concrete. Iron sulfate is common in a lot of garden fertilizers and even warns on the bag - "will stain concrete". YEH! That is what we want.

So I found a few different types at various local gardening stores that were 19% sulfur and 33% iron, the recommended amounts for success. Here and here are where I got inspiration from.

Fertilizer in hand I was sure I would end up with stunning floors. You know something that looks like this.

Umber stain, photo via howtostainconcretefloors.com

Well, I followed the instructions from the blogs and tried a few test areas. Not seeing any immediate results a changed the process up a bit and tried a few different ways. The center section below is an example of what I got.

Yeh, Nothing, Nada, Zilch, Nill, Naught, Zero. Ughhhh, I knew it was too good to be true. Fortunately the fertilizer is pretty inexpensive and I can use it in parts of the garden so not all is lost. 

The sections on either side of the disastrous fertilizer experiment were done using Brickform. We picked up a couple of samples the last time we were at Cemex, yes, like Home Depot, it is a regular destination (Kyle knows how to show me a good time). I applied the samples a few different ways, sprayed it on, painted it on with a paintbrush and poured it on and spread it with a rag. What you use to apply it is critical, you can see the lines here where I used a paintbrush, No Go. It was not a good look. I didn't really like the colors either, they came out a bit orange looking. 

A few years ago I fell in love with Kemiko floors but had forgotten about them till I was doing more research on acid stain for concrete. Still madly in love with these floors I ordered a few samples and when they poured the concrete floors downstairs Kyle had them pour a few little samples that we could use to test the new stains.

This one is Malay Tan. It could ideally use another coat but it is quite light in real life. This picture doesn't really help the true the shade but it is not a deep, warm color we were looking for.

This one is Cola, and on the Kemiko website it comes across as pretty dark but our sample didn't turn out that dark. This one has two coats on already. In real life it has a lot of green in it but it is not bad.

This one is Umber and is the WINNER, ding, ding, ding. It is two coats pretty straight and is just the leathery look that we want. I knew it was a keeper when Kyle walked up and just said "that is IT". It is gorgeous in real life, deep, rich color and just mottled enough. 

There will be a lot of variation when applied to the entire floor as the acid reacts differently with the concrete depending on how the concrete makeup varies. If there is more lime in one area the color will be slightly different than other areas but that is the beautiful irregular look we want. Sort of like this-

Photo source - Kemiko.com

Check out HERE for more pics of different stains...they are stunning. Of course the au natural look is also my favorite - like what Marti did on her floors at the 8747 House.

Well in the midst of installing poop pipes and miles of pex tubing it is fun to think about something finished and pretty. Back to figuring out how to vent the kitchen sink.....oh the life:-)

New Floors

Saturday dawned bright and early with the whole concrete crew cruising in at 5:30am and the first concrete sliding out of the truck before 6.

Eddie, the Pumper Dude, returned to get the concrete out of the trucks and into the house. This job is hard work, you have to move fast and accurately and that concrete hose is very heavy and cumbersome.

The whole team works quickly and in-sync even though they don't always work together, it must be the international language of concrete laying, quite an art.

It took 3 trucks in total and here you can see the next truck waiting in the wings. We used Georgetown Precast which is a local concrete company from up the road. 

This is the big kahuna of Georgetown Precast. The guy on the left is Eddie, The Pumper Dude, he is a more elusive character with the camera.

There is a rough finish applied as the concrete went in and we put a drain in the utility room so they added a slope to the floor on the fly.

The floors in the containers were the hardest as they had all the piping popping through the floor to work around. Once they got into the main slab area it was much easier and faster going.

These guys were not happy campers. They were in doggy jail all day because you know the second they were loose they made a beeline for the concrete and as much as I love to have little footprints in the concrete, straight across the living room wasn't what I had in mind, nor spending the rest of the day washing concrete boots off of big ol' fluffly there.

It was a little nerve wracking as all these walked over the radiant as they poured. We just hoped there would be no little punctures or tears as we went.

We put boards at the end of the containers to edge the concrete.

These zip strips were inserted into key areas of the floor. They are long plastic strips that encourage the concrete to crack there and in a straight line. A concrete floor this size is going to crack. It is unavoidable to be using these strips to control the cracks was great and kept cracks away from high use areas.

These guys work fast and hard. They were all sweating in  no time. Note to all wives, mothers, girlfriends and significant others: Christmas presents should be belts and suspenders for all. I have never seen so much pant hitching in my life!

This center line was an additional footing that tied to the two sections of the foundations together. I think it is an earthquake thing so that the footings move together and don't pull apart.

It was exciting to see the lovely smooth floor all gleaming and lovely. Below you can see where the radiant falls in the slab. The floor in the containers is 3" thick so the radiant tubes are about 2" below the surface and on the slab the concrete is thicker and the radiant falls a little lower.

You can see the forest of pipes sticking up through the floor. We had a last minute panic with fine tuning how we were going to vent the pipes. Ever read a plumbing code book (don't ever if you don't have to, it is actually a secret form of government interrogation that has the highest success rate for garnering secret information). After wiping away the tears from this experience Kyle actually got some input from our building inspector that cleared all our questions up. It was so stressful at the last minute I was ready to nix all the bathrooms and build an outhouse. 

Excuse the rat's nest here, Kyle refers to it as "Cousin It", hey, it was 6am. That thing in the middle of the this lovely bouffant is a concrete nail, they are really cool looking with funny heads on them. I am thinking of marketing the look.

This is the aggregate that is in the concrete, it is locally quarried and is actually really pretty in its own right. It is much lighter in color than most I have seen.

There were a few structural pieces that went into the slab as we poured and obviously their placement was critical to the rest of the house going up. Above is a bolted plate that got set in to the concrete and this will hold the post that will support the staircase. Below are two brackets (hard to see the second one up against the container wall) that will hold posts that support the loft area above.

This is Tim, owner of Precision Concrete, getting down and dirty on his concrete skates putting the final finish on the floor. Below is explaining his plans for World Peace, he is actually onto something.

You can see below the glass fibers that we put in the concrete for added strength. It makes for a furry finish that requires regular mowing. Kidding, these fibers that rose to the top will fall off as we walk on it and clean it. There is a lot of work to do along the walls of the containers to clean up the concrete splashes - sounds like hours of fun ahead for me:-)

We are taking a big deep breath that this part is over. Next is the floor upstairs that couldn't be poured at the same time as it requires a different type of concrete, a lightweight mix. And we have ordered the ICF wall blocks....no rest for the weary insane.

Toasty

After the vapor barrier, horizontal and vertical insulation went in, Tim and Jim from Precision came back to put in the rebar on the pad area.

Once that was in place, Kyle and I could start laying the pex tubing for the radiant heating. And like everything else, the first section took a few "redos" but after that it was pretty smooth sailing.

It is not terribly difficult to install. We had a radiant expert design the layout and the lengths of each run. Of course when we got the design we realized it was all wrong. He had designed for two manifolds, which we have one. He had the tubing in the containers running through the container walls, which can't happen. So we need to do a little alteration on the fly while keeping the lengths somewhat the same and the runs even.

It worked out pretty well and it is great because the tubing is marked each foot with the length so you can judge where you are in the run and how much you can go to the end. 

The radiant in the containers were screwed directly to the wooden floor using little snaps that hold the tubing and  have holes on the side for screws.

The tubing on the slab area got zip tied straight to the rebar and was a little trickier because you wanted to follow the rebar as much as possible to stabilize the loops but the spacing didn't always allow for that.

There are 10 runs total with 4 heating zones. This means that there are 10 lengths of tubing ranging from 220' to 270' in length and we will have 4 separately controlled zones for adjusting the heat. There are 4 runs through the slab area and 3 runs through the containers and then 3 more runs upstairs through the containers. It is great because you don't have to run heat where you don't need it. So we didn't run tubing under the kitchen cabinets or in the pantry, to be able to control where you put heat and where you don't is fantastic. On the flip side we tightened up the loops in the living area as that is where we would probably spend most of our awake time and it has the highest ceiling so we wanted to concentrate more heat in that region.

Kyle got the last of the tubing connected to the manifold at 2:30am on Friday morning and pressurized it on Friday morning (at a normal hour) in preparation for the building inspection. Friday we had both the building inspector and the bank inspection, hectic day on little sleep. All went well and we got the go ahead to pour the slab the next day so it was all systems go to get the guys lined up and the concrete trucks ready.

You learn a lot as you go like when the manifold was losing 8psi in the first few minutes of pressurizing the tubes but then holding steady. Kyle was pulling his hair out to figure why the pressure gauge constantly dropped upon adding pressure. Then the sun went down and the pressure went back up, huh, that is reverse of what should happen with heating and cooling until we figured it out. The sun was softening the tubing and thus expanding and reducing the pressure and then when it cooled down and the tubing went more rigid the pressure would rise. Go figure.....and yes, figuring this out was the highlight of our day. We need to get out more.