Patio Pour

This is our back door moments before the sunken outdoor living room started to be poured.

We used to have to duck to walk under that back deck, and look at it now! It already looks remarkably like the plans.











The retaining walls are nice and beefy, and will have drainage behind them, as well as under the slab.



Here's a shot into the rebar reinforcing the walls/benches










And a shot from above showing the corner radius and our built-in firepit! That diagonal trench is for the gas line so we can have one propane tank next to the house that feeds both the bbq and the firepit.


You can see the slope of the benches which will make them more comfortable to sit in.




This is the coolest concrete truck I've ever seen! (and I've seen my fair share of concrete trucks recently..)
It has a wall down the middle with cement on one side and the aggregate on the other. They hooked it up to our hose and mixed the concrete on the spot. It was WAY louder than the usual trucks, but there's no waste. The guys working had mixed opinions though.. because it's mixed on demand the mixture can be adjusted for conditions, but it also is less consistent than a pre-mixed truck, so every so often they'd need to stop and readjust it. I took a little video of the truck in action, and you can see that the concrete was waay thicker than it should be. That was easily corrected a minute later, but someone has to be paying close attention at all times. I think it's the coolest thing ever, plus it has the advantage of not only being very environmental, since there's no extra concrete that needs to be dumped at the end of a day; but it's also very good for the bottom line, since you only pay for what you use, which means it's much more likely more businesses would use it.

The video:





I won't bore you with the million shots of concrete flowing into the forms, but this one shows the rebar in the steps, along with the box for a light.









This is the concrete being poked and prodded to make sure there are no air pockets, and that the concrete completely fills the forms











And then the really cool part started..

These are the latex stamps which are just about to be used to pound a texture into the fresh concrete.








Once the concrete sets up enough for the forms to be removed, a skim coat with color is buttered on. The pigment is also a hardening agent, so it makes the surface even sturdier.


Expansion joints were cut at random, to make it look less like concrete and more like giant, very conveniently curved, slabs of slate. They even had a chisel which cut edges that looked just like the uneven edges of a piece of slate.




Then an accent color is dusted on and the pounding begins. It's a race for time at this point, as the concrete needs to be hard enough to take the texture, but not so hard that it won't.





I took a little video of the stamping too.. It was quite a team effort, and very labor intensive




After a couple days it's pressure washed, then about a month later it'll be sealed which also brings out the colors. Since neither of of those things have happened yet, I didn't take too many pictures of where it's at right now. They'll be pouring the patio slab on Wednesday (assuming the no rain holds up for awhile longer), so there will be many more pictures to come.

And now, I've got to get back to my giant stack of bricks.. they're not going scrub themselves.

Work weekend

We spent a bunch of time this weekend running around and getting stuff done.. We bought a toilet and some doors (we thought we'd ordered doors 5 weeks ago, but apparently that order never went through and the woman at the lumber store isn't returning our calls.. so we went somewhere else)


And we finished up the stairs, which was really nice with the not raining and all. Couple coats of primer and some caulk, and these stairs should last 10 times longer than the ones built in 1996 which had already rotted away.






While I was on the stairs, Dan was rerouting the water supply line in anticipation of our garage door (which was ordered from someone else, and therefore was actually ordered) which is getting here tomorrow!

Note the motorcycle inside! Strange how much smaller the garage seems with 2 bikes inside.. by the time all our tools and workbenches are in I wonder if we'll have any room left to work!

We got a rollup door so we can have our car in the driveway and still get the door open to get our bikes in and out, and of course it needs to be hung exactly where the copper pipe was. But that's ok, because Dan LOVES soldering copper. And the solder loves him ;)

Here's the finished run.. that's more than $100 in copper right there!

<--Here's the view out back

The water doesn't seem to be getting any worse.. we were worried the hole was filling up with groundwater, which would mean whole different things for our drainage plan. But that top left corner is the low spot, and the ground is wet from all the rain, so that's just the surface water (at least, that's the hope)

But take a look at that top middle caving in section. If that collapses any further, the tent with all our garage stuff is going to go tumbling into the pit.

So, on the negative side, we need to get that taken care of asap, which means we're going to need to bring someone in to do it since it's not going to get done fast enough on weekends and the odd day off. On the plus side, that means we're going to have our patio done really soon!

We finally got that swimming pool we've always wanted..

It's time to play What's Missing in this Picture!

I won't make you scroll down to see the answers, but there are bonus points if you can find the 2 extra things in the picture:

• No porta-potty!
• No concussion-inducing plywood on the porch!
• No giant, flappy blue tarp!
• No rain!!

Extra credit: There's a bobcat pulling out with a load of dirt from the back yard.

Extra, extra credit: Our motorcycles are IN the garage! (that's worth extra points because it's such a crappy picture)

On what's likely to be the last Saturday we're woken up by people working on the house (mostly because we'll be dragging our butts out of bed to do everything else ourselves..), we heard the happy hum of a bobcat scooping out the dirt in back.

As you can see here, the back door is quite a bit lower than the ground level, which doesn't really work out all that well for a door. Everyone was very concerned about digging it out now, because if the rain returns before we get the retaining walls in, we'll have a giant swimming pool with the sides sliding/caving in. But we want to get started on that next, and the last part of these guys' job for us was excavating the area.

And here it is all dug out and shored up. It is very swimming pool like.. especially if when you jumped up and down on the bottom of a pool, it undulated out like a bouncy house. It's pretty worrisome actually.. there are pools of water which are gradually growing, and the ground back by the tent has caved in to about a foot away from the tent. We need to get the retaining walls in soon.

And that's the task for the coming week.. Coming soon: our sunken outdoor living room!

Another Crazy Idea-Sunken Concrete Patio!

Turning Lemons into Lemonade in Grand Style!!

One of the things we didn't count on when doing this project was just how much the lot slopes from back to front. At the front the new slab will only be about a foot underground, while here in the back as the picture shows it's more like 3'!!! Yikes, we can't have our new door opening into a 3' tall dirt wall can we?
Here's what it looks like from inside the back room looking out into the back yard. We knew the back door was going to be below grade, just not this much. In the original contract with the concrete company they are going to excavate back 20', even with the sides of the house and re-pour the deck post footings so they will be at grade. We were thinking maybe 2' high walls....well, in the back they are going to be more like 3.5' walls!!! Yikes!!! Walls that tall are going to require a retaining wall.. we can't just have them make the cut and go away and get to it later - the walls will collapse and make a mess.

Here's what we've come up with! A big gorgeous sunken patio that Irene is calling our sunken living room. It'll have a stamped concrete floor (with drainage) to look like flagstones. We were not sure about how the stamped concrete would look but we saw an example on a house and it looked fine. We will use concrete stains to make it look like real stone. Along three sides of the patio we will have concrete benches. We would like some way to texture the benches so they don't look like concrete, but we don't know if they can be stamped like the patio? In the upper south-east corner we are going to plumb in a gas line for a fire pit that folks can sit around when it gets cold out. We also left space for a BBQ (which will also be plumbed with nat gas-yeah no more tanks to change!!)

Here's what the cross-section of the bench-retaining wall will look like. The seat is sloped for drainage, and the back and knee section will be sloped for comfort.
Here's the brilliant thing - the benches can be viewed as a two tier retaining wall (of odd shape for sure) that won't require permits!! Or a hand rail along the outside of the patio! The patio does not require permits either so we can do the whole thing without the city getting involved!!! Yahoo!!!! No paperwork, no fees!!!! and we'll have a super cool outdoor entertaining area for our most favorite BBQ parties!
So, what do y'all think? Great idea? Crazy idea?