Getting Ready for the Concrete.



   February was dedicated to the prepping for the concrete pours. 

Once the garage was poured and cured, we were ready for the wire mesh to be laid down over the insulation.  The wire mesh is what we tied the PEX tubing down to.  This was a very long couple of days.  February was not very warm and the tubing was not very flexible due to the chill in the air.  We were very fortunate that the winds weren't blowing & the rain wasn't coming down.  It took about 3 days of intense labor to string out and tie down the tubing.  My body was pretty sore and I was thinking it would have been nice to pay a crew to do it.  The cost savings were too large to pay someone else to do something we were capable of.  The most important thing here was to make sure we left enough spacing where there would be walls installed.  Now we were starting to see the downstairs layout.  That was very nice.

Petie was working on helping us get some tubing and bringing the wire tie downs for me to attach.  It's wonderful when the kids help out!  I know it's not a lot of fun, because they have to wait around quite a bit waiting for their next task and that surely can get boring. 

Once all the PEX tubing was laid & attached, the supply and returns were attached and the system was pressurized with air.  We crossed our fingers that it would hold the pressure so we could schedule the concrete pour.

The concrete pour was very intense.  Seeing all this piping and conduit being embedded was a little scary to me.  Was it good enough?  Did we pick the right spot for all walls, the toilets, the washer and all the drains?  Speaking of drains, I sure wish I would have thought to have one placed in the mud-room.  That just wasn't thought of until well after the walls went up.





Here you can see the master bathroom. 

 

The concrete finish was super!  Then the guys did a floating trowel and made the concrete as smooth as possible.  The used a hard trowel to "burn" in darkness into the concrete.  The hope is that it will resemble marble once it is complete.  We chose to do natural concrete, without stain.  We did not add any color into the concrete mixture, just relied on the guys to apply the hard trowel until the creamy concrete had dark areas.



What a beautiful sunset shining across the freshly finished slab foundation!

Day 2 of the concrete pour consisted of pouring the shower.  I had this fabulous idea of just having a concrete shower floor and hand-seeding rocks into the concrete mixture.  That did not go so well.  Many factors probably played into the failure here.  The concrete they used had a lot of aggregate in it.  It was the same batch that they were using for the porches that would be exposed aggregate.

Me and one of the concrete guys hand-seeding rocks for the shower floor.

 As we were planting the rocks into the concrete, it started to get hard...and fast.  (duh)  Well, I had never realized just how fast it gets set until this day.  Just minutes into seeding these rocks, we had about 5 other guys helping to get these rocks in.  Problem with that?  Well, no one did it the same.  The crew did not really speak too much English, so it was difficult to understand or communicate too thoroughly.  Once I looked at our completed job, I realized that the concrete was rising, kind of like a cake.  Some people pushed these rocks too far in the concrete and the concrete seemed to just swallow them up.  Some rocks laid on top, and looked smooth, others were shifting.  The guys grabbed trowels and started beating the rocks down into the concrete and that created even more rising.  The creamy concrete started rising and brought up the smaller aggregate from within the concrete.  I was assured that once the acid wash was complete, it would all be OK.



You can see the "rising" affect and how it changed the slopes.



We had the drain installed in the far right corner of the shower. The shower floor needed to slope a few different ways.  The water needed to stay away from pooling along the walls and also head down toward the drain.  The rising of the concrete put the floor above where the walls would start.  Also, the pushing of the rocks into the concrete really upset all the proper angles.  We stood back, shook our heads as they sprayed the acid and let it sit.  The next step was to wait for it to set and be pressure washed to expose the rocks.



The dreaded gravel shower floor.



As you can see from the picture above, there were a lot of little rocks that made quite an appearance.  The slopes weren't good and that meant we had to have the concrete chiseled out.  The problems apparent to me were that within this shower floor there was PEX tubing.  So yes, we had to have the concrete removed carefully as to avoid damaging any tubing.  We felt very lucky to go without incident.  There was one section of the tube that was crushed a bit, but not gouged.  The pressure gauge was still at 20 psi.  We were thankful for that.