8.24.2015

Hopefully we have a new concrete contractor!  Last night, we went to see a slab he just poured - actually, it was two slabs.  There was a garage and a walk out basement - both looked really nice.  So Jim emailed him this morning and said we wanted to get on his schedule.  He called Jim this afternoon and said this week looked busy but he would call Jim on Wednesday and see how things looked.  This guy has been so professional and always returns calls and emails promptly - so different than the last guy and so many people we deal with.

Which means our main focus today was working on the slab to get it ready.  Now that all the scaffolding is gone, we can do that.  Jim worked really hard this morning taking the gravel base from this...



to this.  This required getting the bigger stone gravel out by hand shoveling, filling in low spots, and compacting it.  After talking with the contractor when he was at the site, Jim is probably going to have him pour the auto lift footer at the same time.  Jim was worried about it cracking, but this guy said he can cut a 4" deep cut all the way around it so it should be fine.  That will save us lots of money and time rather than doing it ourselves.

Now that Jim had a good base, it was time to bring in the small gravel.  That necessitated moving the stack of blocks again....some things it seems like we move from one place to another until they get used!

Once the block was gone, Jim took the big pile of gravel that he dug from inside and graded it out.

Looks much better now.

Time for the little gravel!  I would fill up buckets of gravel and Jim would haul them to the other side and dump them.

Then he would level it all out...

Making sure everything is level...

Compacting once again....

And of course, some final touches!

Then we repeated that on the other side...

Getting it all leveled out....

Then it was HydroFoam time!  Jim had gotten the gravel so level that the foam went down perfectly - he really didn't need to adjust any of the gravel.

Opening up the last package of HydroFoam!

Looks amazing!

Once all the main pieces were down, it was time to cut smaller pieces to fill in.

Filling in the edges...

Adding the smaller pieces to the end...

We had a full piece left so we added it to the stairwell area.  This area isn't going to have Pex in it so it didn't have to have HydroFoam and we wanted to make sure we had enough.

Cutting all the foam pieces by hand is kind of a workout, so for the small side fill in pieces, Jim got out his saw.

Filling in the sides with perfectly-cut pieces.

This side is all finished!

 

We just have a few more fill-in pieces to go but that can be done anytime.  The day was coming to a close and Jim had lots of grass to cut so we will continue working on this tomorrow.

 

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