We got a basement floor, with help, this week. The best concrete day to date, but I’m still not a fan of concrete day.
But before concrete could go in, we had to prepare the floor for the concrete. This involved getting in 5 trucks of 2-inch crushed stone to go between the bedrock and concrete floor. The stone slinger was an interesting thing to watch, and after moving all that other stone on top of the Big-O by buckets I was thankful to have it. It was a lot of stone, and I can’t even imagine it simply being dumped and moving into place after the fact.
We did still spend hours using the tamper and spent a couple of nights with the laser level trying to get it all flat and level.
Despite thinking we had it almost perfect, every imperfection was felt when we put down the insulation on top of the stone. We were close with the order for the insulation, having only one full piece and cuts extra. With the insulation down and attached together with tuck tape, we were now ready for the concrete.
Two full trucks of concrete, and we still came up a little short. In the end, we had to mix about 15 bags by hand to finish the floor. The first truck arrived at about noon and the second truck left at about three, so it wouldn’t have been a long day if not for the extra concrete we had to mix, and then wait to dry. By the time we got that done, we were starting to lose the sun behind the trees.
This time not only did we recruit more people to help, but we also had a plan. (Mostly with thanks to the neighbour.) We had a board that was built to be the height we wanted the floor, and that allowed us to do it in sections and level it out fairly easily and quickly. After it was mostly leveled out with rakes, we had the Magic Leveler to smooth it out. (And it was completely the right thing, unlike the vibrator we had rented for the foundation walls.)
Once the concrete started to dry we also went over it (a lot) with a Power Trowel. That thing could throw you around if you weren’t careful with it. We ended up running that over the floor long after our help left as we went over the whole floor, then went back to the beginning and did it again until it started to scratch more than it was making it smooth. We ended up going past sunset, and the little one’s bedtime, mostly because of the extra bags we had to do, that took forever to be dry enough to run the Power Trowel over it.
On a whole, the floor turned out fantastic, and it was the least stressful concrete day we’ve had so far. That being said, I’m still so happy we are done with concrete deliveries for this project.
Thank you for following along. As always, please follow us on Facebook and we’ll see you next week.
Huron The Lake 