Monday, November 1, 2010

Upper floor concrete poured, with apologies to our neighbours in Beverly Heights

A frosty start to the day.
Coffee & cake powered concrete crew.
it's a bird, a plane...No, a flying power trowel!
Mike & Alex troweling the shower. Hoping for a slope to drain.

My awesome concrete crew!

Power trowelin' started at 6pm. Finish: 10pm.
Saturday was another intense concrete pour, placement and finishing day.  Work started at 8am and I wasn't done until 11pm.  This time we had lots of help.  A big thank you to Robert, Mike Juchli, Alex & Rita, Nadir, Jud and Matt for helping out! The pumper truck arrived at 8:15am, the concrete truck at 8:30am and we were done placing the concrete by noon. There was a curing/drying break from 1pm to 6 pm, but I found lots of other things to do. Like cleaning up the interior and making sure our basement insulation is tight to the concrete wall.
 
Our concrete pump guy got nervous at the amount of concrete we had, so I ended up unnecessarily ordering another 2 cubic meters of the stuff.  Most of which is now part of the the basement floor fill. But at the time and in the thick of things, it was far better to be over supplied with concrete, than run out with very little floor left to do. Oh well. Lesson learned. Trust your calculations, rather than a nervous concrete guy.

And I apologize to our Beverly Heights neighbours who didn't send out anyone to complain, [or call the cops] as we power trowelled into the night right up until 10pm. The power trowel has a noisy, lawn-mover like engine on it, and being 1 storey above ground, I'm sure it radiated throughout the neighbourhood. Again, my apologies. I will try to be the best neighbour ever.

Matt and I then hand trowelled until 11pm. Well, Matt did most of it.  He made me clean the tools. My body isn't meant for doubling over to trowel, scrape and trowel some more. Must book massage therapy.

The look of the upper floor is 100x better than our main floor! [Does this mean we're getting better at it?]  We'll be pros by the time the basement is done!

7 comments:

  1. Awesome... you ARE experts now - must feel good to have that portion done. You aren't pouring concrete for the 3rd floor?

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  2. Trust me, I'm FAR from being an expert.
    I believe 2 floors of concrete floors for thermal mass is enough! We have some old school gym hardwood floor that was salvaged, so we hope to use that for the loft floor.

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  3. I just hope you're available when we build our house.

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  4. Hi Shafraaz, the house is coming along very nicely! I biked by before the walls went up and would like to do so again soon. Not a single road to cross from my house in Mill Creek to yours. Sorry I missed your call for concrete helpers. Maybe the concrete guy was nervous knowing how much concrete ends up left in the pump and the boom, and past experiences of people running out.

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  5. That was a long day. Hey, always feel free to give us a call if you'd like an extra hand - even if just for babysitting. :)

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  6. I would love to know how or if you insulated the sub floor? We are about to pour concrete on our main floor tomorrow and are on the fence if we should be insulating to avoid any 'heat loss' to the lower level.

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  7. I think you were asking not about the basement floor- but whether it should be insulated between two separate living spaces. The simple answer is no, we did not insulate the subfloor. That is because the heat loss to the floor below is still in the tempered space. It is only the heat loss to the outside that is a problem.

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