Hurray for Concrete!

Chez Neumansky had another visit from the concrete fairy!

Much as the 8am on a Saturday concrete delivery was probably not loved by our neighbors, I'm sure they'll be as happy as we will to have the porta-potty off the sidewalk and no more tarps flapping in the wind!

As you can see, we passed our inspection for the radiant heat and got the go-ahead to pour. The last odds and ends were taken care of yesterday: put rebar down in the driveway, broke up the sidewalk to encase the sump pump's discharge pipe and repair what had been broken, and everything up off the floor/ground to make way for the concrete.

Bright and early this morning they rolled up and got to work.



Look at it oozing in!

<--You can see the outline of our bathroom here. Although the pex is fairly indestructible I'm still sore from putting it in (remind me to buy stock in zip ties.. with those and some duct tape, there's nothing that can't be built), so they've been humoring me by stepping in between the tubing as much as possible.

I'm happy with how deep the tubing is in the concrete.. it needs an inch of concrete above it, or there's a possibility of cracks when it heats up. In some places it looked like it might be pretty close, but it all seems very nicely embedded.





The teamwork is really impressive.. one guy holds the tube spitting out the concrete, one shovels it around to make sure it gets everywhere and sometimes there's someone else with a trowel getting it into the tight spots, and they all stomp it around with their rubber boots..

..then one guy makes a pass with a 2"x4" to smooth it down, and then two guys screed it for real with a longer 2"x4"


Then they let it set for a little while, and for the larger areas someone comes back in and cuts control joints to limit cracks in the wide expanses of concrete.





And then it's all gone over with a float to make it nice an smooth and pretty.. "mirror finish" they've been calling it.
















I'm also a little surprised with how much work is done by hand, especially around the stairs.


See that box on Dean's belt? That's a remote controller for the concrete! So he can be in the back of the house and be able to turn the flow on and off as needed.. pretty cool stuff






<-- The front steps are almost done.


It's very exciting to think that soon we'll be able to go in and out our front door! and I bet there will be no trudging through mud to find our newspaper ever again..





<-- Here are the two steps we need to get down to the new level at the front of the house. Aren't they lovely??

In back we have a much larger difference in level, which we'll deal with as a separate project.









Back out front we have the sidewalks getting smoothed down (moments before the rain showed up and left little divets everywhere.. it'll be good for traction.. yeah, that's it.. it's a feature!)

And the driveway is getting a broom-finish which is rougher than everywhere else. That'll make it easier for the mortar to stick when I put down the bricks.


And voila! We have to put doors up next, and touch up some paint.. but we're getting very close to having at least the outside of the house not be an eyesore!

Let there be heat.. someday

We lagged a little bit on making a decision about whether we wanted to put radiant heat in the slab downstairs, so we're currently holding everything up. These guys would've been ready to pour concrete last week, but we had some problems getting a permit (I know.. shocking, isn't it?!)

Dan knows a guy from an online newsgroup that works for a radiant heat place on the east coast. He designed the whole system and shipped us all the parts and plans. That, plus a weekend or so of manual labor is at a savings of about $8k from the quote we got for someone else to install the tubing!

<-- Don't these plans look beautiful?! Well, the city didn't think so.. at least not the section on the left where the garage and workshop have heat. Turns out, heating a garage is prohibeted in Alameda, along with even insulating one! Dan spent 2 days at the permit office, and talked to everyone on up to the head of the building department, but the answer was still no. We either have to build a wall to make a completely separate garage and then heat only the workshop, or no heat at all on that side of the bearing wall. Well, after all the effort to get a beam engineered to hold up the house so we could have a wide-open workshop, there's no way we're going to split it back up! Plus, we'd have to make it about 3 times bigger than the original garage was, because now that the wall is gone, we'd have to fulfill modern parking requirements. Needless to say, our workshop is not going to be as warm as we'd planned on.

So the plans were resubmitted with only the back part of the house having heat, and those were approved.

Everything we needed to install the tubing arrived within a week!

Dan assemled the manifold ->>

.. and then it was just a matter of zip-tying several hundred feet of half inch pex tubing to the rebar.. We rigged up a little spool on some sawhorses so the tubing wouldn't get all twisted up, and then pulled out enough for a loop at a time.
The only places we had problems were around some of the edges that were a bit too high.. the pex needs to be under at least an inch of concrete or the slab could crack. I ran the tubing under the rebar in those areas, and it's closer than I'd like in some spots, but according to the specs it should be good.

Check out my awesome blister! Someday I'll learn to wear my work gloves..

And voila!

Doesn't it look just like the plans?!

This is the bedroom, and it's on one circuit..

And this is the hallway leading to the back door, and the bathroom (in the yellow rectangle at the bottom right of the pic), and our spiral staircase (yellow square at the top right. The mounting points on the center column are market out so we don't hit tubing when we drill and epoxy in the bolts)

And here's the moment of truth.. the pressure test.

All the tubing is plumbed into the manifold, and then the system is filled with air. It leaked from a bunch of places at first, but with a little effort it seemed to be all good! Except that it's not holding pressure.. At 80 psi in about an hour it dropped down to 65 psi with no obvious leaks.

(handy tip for anyone looking to test for air leaks: get a bowl of soapy water and a brush. Brush the water onto all the connections and anywhere that's leaking will bubble up.)

Hopefully there's just a very slow leak from the manifold that's going unnoticed in the soapy water test.. because if it's leaking from any of the lines it'll be a looooong process to track it down.

We were hoping to get that inspected tommorow, and then the slab could be poured next week, but we need to figure out where it's leaking from and who knows how long that'll take.. Better that it leaks now than a year from now when most of it's embedded in concrete and it's impossible to fix.. but it sure would've been nice to have it be perfect the first time.

Blue Skies!

70 mph winds and flood warnings, but all we can see when we look out the window are bright island skies! Loud, flapping, plastic skies :)

This was exactly the weather I was scared of, but these guys are going out of their way to make it as painless as possible for us.. The house is sitting on a foundation, and it's all backfilled in, so the ground around the house is solid. Every opening is covered with a tarp, so the only place water is getting in now is through the gap between the sill plate and the first piece of siding.

<--They're getting out the last of the forms here, and getting ready to spread gravel inside.




All the foundation drainage is in place, and we have all the downspouts tied into it as well, but the sump pump wasn't supposed to go in until after the slab was poured. The rain is predicted to be pretty constant for a few days, so they managed to get the pit in place and the pump working before the storm hit. And boy is it working!

The slab still needs to poured under it, and the outlet still needs to be laid but this is a pretty good test of the system. The water is just shooting out a pvc pipe next to the front stairs for now..

.. which brings me to the very exciting detail..


..WE HAVE FRONT STAIRS!!!

They were only visible for a few minutes before everything got battened down, but look how nice!!! Jeff primed them before the rain, so they'll be ready for us to finish once this work is done. (We thought we were going to be building them ourselves at the end of the month, so I'm extra-excited that they're already there!)

And.. do you notice anything else about this picture? There's a newspaper on the stairs!! They've only been there for 5 minutes and there's already a newspaper on them!! (I may be exaggerating slightly, but I was used to the morning game of hide-and-seek at our old place to find the newspaper under the car, or sticking out of a slightly-worse-for-wear plant.. one more reason I LOVE ALAMEDA!)





Here's the underside of the stairs.. I can't wait to walk on them! They look very nice and sturdy, don't they?!


The sump pit is just to left of here.. So we still have a little room under the stairs that we can use for storage. We have much more living space here than our old house, but a net loss of storage. And we have to find somewhere to keep all those Halloween decorations!








Getting back inside..


<-- This is the view in the garage after the cribbing came out. It didn't stay like this for long. There was more dirt excavated to bring everything down to the correct, even level.


Then a pile of clean crushed gravel was poured for drainage.



A thin vapor barrier was put down on top of the gravel, then a layer of sand was spread on top of that.







And then, because we're going to put radiant heat in the slab, a layer of 2" foam insulation was put down.


(We'll post some details about the radiant heat.. we went back and forth on whether to do it, then decided we'd be silly to not take this opportunity to put it in since once the slab is poured it'll be much more work and money to put it in later.)




And then, on top of the insulation, the Bituthene goes down (it looks sort of like whitish asphalt in these pictures.. it's a thicker than I expected)


And then finally, the rebar goes on top! The spacers hold the rebar in place so they wind up in the center of the slab.


We'll be tying the tubing for the radiant heat onto the rebar.. so we'll be holding things up for about a week. Otherwise, they'd be ready to pour the slab now.


Here are some other odds and ends around..

This is the rough plumbing for our new bathroom.. Turns out venting wasn't part of the plumber's price quote, so that's costing more than we thought..

And no, that's not structural mustard.. it's chalk they used to mark the position of the rebar.






Here's that beefy beam I was telling you about in the main workshop area. This guy is holding up the whole front part of the house, so we only have that post in the space and not a whole wall! It's very exciting.


And there's plenty of room above the beam to run all our wires and plumbing and what-not, so we won't need to notch the joists for anything.





And here is the final framing in the garage! It looks just like a garage, doesn't it?!




Next up is the radiant heat.. and waiting out the storm