Pouring a garage floor
August 20, 2010
You Tube offers a variety of film clips on just about any subject, but when I looked for instructions on how to finish concrete, the supply of information suddenly dried up. After yesterday’s pour of a garage slab at the farm I now understood the reason. With four compulsive photographers on the job, not one thought to pick up a camera. There was just too much grit, too much to do, and too little time to spare for non-essentials.
None of us had poured a floor before. Derek offered to help before heading off to MIT for post-doctoral work. That physics background helped: he turned out to be a smart and willing concrete worker. I suspect Martin, the biologist, had never set foot on a construction site before, but he learned quickly and showed amazing strength and stamina. A veteran of projects with Dad, Charlie brought an eye for detail and a dose of caution to the mix, determined to head off his father’s sometimes-reckless excesses.
The family book on me is that I’m good at measuring and cutting but hopeless with anything sticky. Charlie’s never quite gotten over the time I varnished the transom of the boat with a mop. Concrete was an unknown, the transition from liquid to solid fraught with mystery and conflicting opinion, but all sources agreed that timing is critical.
Building inspector Alahan Kabdasamy insisted that I couldn’t pour a floor by myself, nor with one helper: I would need a full crew. So Charlie rounded up Derek and Martin and the plan came together. It’s one thing to plug away by yourself on a project. It’s quite another to schedule an inspection, a volunteer crew with little time-flexibility, and a truckload of highly-perishable concrete on a day with good weather for a pour.
It worked. The truck pulled in two minutes early, and Charlie and Martin were on time. Derek followed them in the lane. The sky was clear.
The driver quickly sized us up and took charge. He knew what to do. I had straightened a sixteen-foot 2X4 that morning on my jointer. That would be our screed. A small beam laminated up out of 4″ pine boards divided the floor in half and set the grade. We would be able to support the screed on the outside forms and the pine beam to level the concrete, then hopefully remove it at the end of the pour and fill in the gap.
The rebar at the perimeter of the slab sat neatly wired to the little plastic “chairs” I had located in Kingston the day before. For the mesh which covered the bulk of the floor the supports were just a hindrance, though. Pulling the mesh up with a hay hook or garden rake worked much better. I hadn’t anticipated quite how chaotic screeding ten cubic yards of concrete – that’s 40,000 pounds – can be. Alahan was right: we definitely needed all four guys on the crew for this part.
To push across the floor with a bull float, you hold the handle low to plane the large trowel fastened rigidly to a 12′ pole over the rough surface; for the return trip you pull from above your head to plane the other edge of the trowel on the way back. Yikes! Much taller Martin took over and quickly became proficient with the thing. He even had enough energy in reserve to shake the float to work the moisture to the surface as the LaFarge guy recommended.
I placed the anchor bolts and Charlie shaped the edges of the slab. Derek went around the bolts with a hand trowel.
Much debate ensued about when was the right time to start the power trowel: the concrete at the southwest corner was almost two hours wetter than the stuff at the northeast, so when and where do you begin?
Charlie looked horrified as I stepped up onto the slab. Oops. Sank too much. Hasty repairs. Twenty minutes later, though, I only sank about a quarter-inch, and that’s when the Internet advice suggested we start to trowel.
None of us had run one of these things. There are no useful sets of instructions available, either. We put the coarse paddles on it, started it up, and the lads lowered it onto the pad.
A power trowel has to be the most right-brained tool I have ever operated. I couldn’t tell you now how to control it. The more I troweled the less I had to rely on strength, but I don’t know what I did differently. The coarse paddles took a serious toll on the anchor bolts, though. Derek and Martin stayed busy with repairs.
But the machine reduced the sticky concrete to a workable substance I could measure and cut, so I soon had the grade where I wanted it. Internet advice said to continue to trowel until you don’t care any more. That point came quite quickly because we were bushed. The slab was smooth and slightly grainy. Any smoother could be a safety hazard. Into the trailer and back to Elgin the strange inverted helicopter went.
Fortunately by 3:30 a thunderstorm took over and gave me a break from spraying the slab. After supper I rolled on a coat of preservative and the day’s work was done. Whew!
Stone House Reno 5: moving the tools out
June 25, 2009
The end of June
All my life the end of June has been the time to say goodbye, take a rest, and start on a new project. I suppose it’s fitting, then, that today I moved the tools out of the stone house we’ve been renovating since my retirement in the fall of 2004. My shop, refuge, and storehouse for the last thirty-five years has now officially become a dwelling. One floor still needs some sanding and the whole thing needs varnish, but the days of muddy boot tracks to the bathroom have now come to an end.
I’ll miss the time I could put visitors at ease by chiming the house rule as they came in through the door: “No boots in the shower, but they’re optional in bed.”
Bet’s done her best to remain tolerant of my mess for the last few months, but I tend to believe actions more than words, and the two hours of frantic vacuuming upon each arrival at the farm for a weekend sent a clear message: it was time to get on with it.
She even helped me move the tenon cutter out of the living room. It’s a heavy relic from a pre-war factory, and the only way to move it without destroying the floor turned out to be by winching it up to one of the timbers I had installed as a room divider. Once I set it on a heavy plywood dolly with a chain hoist, it was pretty easy to move around. We managed to wiggle it out through the front doors (weeks of work on those doors) and into the bucket of the waiting loader.
Today two saws, a jointer, and my prized Poitras shaper made the trip to the barn. This made me sad. It was like leaving the comfort and security of my childhood home. Funny, the beds, the food, two computers and a television are still there, but it’s the shaper I miss. And I haven’t even had the thing for that long, only about three years. But it’s had a hand in everything good or interesting I have done in this renovation: the flooring, the cabinets, those muntined glass doors Bet insisted upon, the passage and entrance doors, the windows, the baseboards, the stairs, the crown moulding over the doors and windows, even the ceiling and window paneling – it all came off that shaper.
So now I face the grueling task of cleanup. The floor is littered with scraps of walnut from the stair-railing project and a lot of pine shavings from the final door casing in the bathroom which went on this morning.
Oh well, once that’s done I get to drive my floor sander around for a day or two. The old Clark drum sander is far from my favourite tool, but it’s heavy, loud and powerful, so it should stave off nostalgia for a little while until the varnished-floors regime becomes oppressive and I lay out the foundations for a new shop.
For other articles in this series check:
https://rodcroskery.wordpress.com/category/renovating-a-stone-house/
Stone House Reno 4: Making a railing
June 18, 2009
Soggy, but a good day for staircase-building. I’m putting a railing 56″ long along the hall next to the stairs. 1.3″ square plain balusters are fitting into the flooring and up into the rail at 34″. After much thought I decided to cut 1″ dowels into the ends of the balusters, then drill and glue. Surprisingly, the dowel-cutting went very well in the walnut stock: a 1″ diameter plug cutter mounted in the drill press machined the stock secured in the vice so as to cut between the jaws to get the end grain without splitting it. No problem, virtually an instant 5/8″ tenon, so little remained to do but cut the pieces to length and try the same thing on the other end of the 11 pieces. No extras. I missed one measurement by an inch, but caught the goof on the check before sawing. Whew!
To clear the cuts I set up a jig on the band saw to allow only a 5/8″ cut. Then I just sorta circumcised the ends, leaving the dowels exposed.
Then I hit the spreadsheet to calculate the distance between the posts so that I could lay out the floor for drilling. That went well, except that after layout I had a need for 13 posts. Hmmmm. Better not drill yet.
Turns out for each station I had added by 1/2 the post’s width when I should have added by the whole thing. Ready to start drilling 1″ holes in the floor now, but am feeling a bit lazy, so I checked mail instead, and then wrote this.
“So, Rod, how good is the staircase?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Depends upon how good the story about it turns out to be.”
………
Back at it the following day. I had drilled the flooring for the balusters yesterday, using my trusty 6″ dial caliper to scratch arcs on the flooring to intersect a straight line down the middle of the planned railing. This time the count worked out, so I firmed up the marks with a marker pen and transferred them to the railing to run above. Just to be safe I did a rough set of marks with a pencil by laying the railing alongside the floor marks and roughly scribed them across. Then I established the one most likely to be correct and measured the other marks for holes in the railing off it with the caliper. Not surprisingly, these marks corresponded quite well with the rough measurements, but this precaution left me confident throughout the drilling that I hadn’t done the whole thing backwards.
The drill press is much steadier than my arm, but that advantage disappeared as soon as I rounded the top of the railing. Instead I clamped the railing firmly to the bench and had at it with a hand drill and a 1″ Forstener bit. While the hole depth isn’t critical with shouldered tenons, it’s still vital that there be adequate space for the tenon itself and any glue accumulated in the bottom of the hole. Several of the holes needed more drilling to provide adequate clearance. The holes, while not perfectly vertical, seemed to work adequately. None of the posts fell out when I glued them in.
Realizing the risks of gluing above a long run of wood to be stained, I left the balusters upturned in the railing for as long as I dared before moving them to the hall for installation. I still needed to be able to manipulate them a little bit in their sockets before they set hard. With an assistant I nervously flopped the eleven posts and their rail onto the hall floor, grinned hopefully when the whole thing did not fall apart, and then slid the assembly into the glued holes provided for it in the upstairs hall. In it went. No drips, no spills, no fuss.
Huh???
Next up, fabricating a hollow newel post.
For other articles in this series check:
https://rodcroskery.wordpress.com/category/renovating-a-stone-house/
Stone House Reno 3: Floors and sagging timbers
April 26, 2009
The windows conquered, our thoughts turned to the floor. The original builders had fitted half-squared cedar timbers into the stone foundation. Over them they nailed thick, wide, tongue-and-groove planks. Later floors came along as needed. We were loathe to tear up the 14″ boards in the kitchen, but they didn’t match the height of either the dining room’s yellow pine or the birch in the parlour.
Much thought went into a plan to level the floors out. Once we pulled up the yellow pine we found that on the way to the back door the boards underneath were worn so thin we could almost see through to the basement. To make a base for the new planking I laid out a pattern of ribs rather like the “floors” on a boat, carefully band-sawn to the contours of the worn floor and nailed in on nine inch centres. The new ash boards would sit on them. Maybe all those years of work on the old cruiser weren’t wasted, after all.
When every plank is a one-off and you’re in no particular hurry, there’s no reason not to make the flooring over the high spots thinner than the rest of the floor. I improvised when I could, and the floor’s slopes and undulations gradually disappeared to produce a relatively flat surface.
It’s a good thing I don’t rent much equipment: it took me twenty days to lay the ash on the ground floor. In so doing I covered a large register, an abandoned stairwell, a trapdoor, a dumbwaiter through to the basement, and many miscellaneous holes cut over the years. In one doorway the flooring hovered above nothing but the stone foundation. It’s a good thing ash is strong. After a few days with my drum sander, though, the ridges and valleys had disappeared and revealed quite a nice floor.
Then came wiring, insulation, vapour barrier and sheetrock. At last we could heat the building to a comfortable temperature!
At this point I threw rational planning to the winds and installed a ceiling: we needed something finished to look at, so 400 square feet of v-grooved basswood from the woodlot went up between the timbers on the kitchen ceiling. We tried not to notice how much this smooth, clean shape reminded everyone of the bottom of a boat. The elephant in the room was the way the upstairs sagged down just about where our kitchen island was destined to sit.
Unable to come up with a plan to deal with the problem above me, I chose to ignore it and devote the winter to building kitchen cabinets, two rows high, with muntined glass panes, a built-in china cabinet, pantry, kitchen island, the works. I even managed to install a 7 inch flue for the range hood through two feet of stone wall.
Then we started the upstairs. As we removed partitions, the upstairs floor became more and more like a trampoline. It got to where guests were afraid to walk across it. Turns out all of those little rooms upstairs were hanging from the rafters and holding the floor up. Now they were gone. When the sheetrock arrived for the room above the kitchen, I had to prop up one sagging timber or risk an ugly crash.
Two months of agony passed with a variety of failed solutions to the support problem. Finally I bit the bullet and installed some cross beams.
I had spotted a couple of possible candidates in the haymow of a strong, but unsightly building on the property. It needed to go anyway, so I tore into its frame with my chain saw, and shortly I had two magnificent ash beams of the proper length, grayed and worn smooth by years of contact with hay and traffic.
The beams were easy to handle with my tractor outside the house. Moving them through the front door was another matter entirely, but I was able to flag down a passing forestry crew and get them to move the 350 lb. timbers to within reach of my pulley blocks in return for a few collectible pictures of Queen Elizabeth.
To place steel jack posts in the studded walls I had to take the cabinets down, of course. The actual work wasn’t nearly as agonizing as deciding to do it. The job also produced one unexpected benefit: Bet helped with the first timber. She had never been around such an operation and for some reason she flat-out admired the way I raised the beam into place with a couple of ratchet straps. It had been a long time since I had done anything which made an impression upon her like that, and I basked in the adulation.
The second timber went up without an audience, and I was able to close the walls back in and restore the cabinets to their places. A third beam found itself beneath a similar expanse of timbers in the living room. This one had a rather nice mortise in the middle. I made the mistake of telling our son that the wooden pin in the mortise was a hanging point for a child’s jolly jumper. My too-obvious campaigning for a grandchild must have spooked him because we didn’t see him for a couple of weeks thereafter.
For other articles in this series check:
https://rodcroskery.wordpress.com/category/renovating-a-stone-house/
Stone House Reno: 2. Parging and Window Frames
April 13, 2009
By the time I’d figured out how to do it, the job was done.
The interior walls of the old stone house needed a lot of work because the wind could whip right through in most areas. I bought a used cement mixer, a trailer-load of masonry sand, a few types of cement, and learned how to make parging mix. My dad’s recipe didn’t warn me that the ingredients would form into a ball and just roll around in the mixer unless I took care in the way I mixed them, but eventually I figured it out. (See Chapter 6 of this series for more detail).
Then came the problem of getting the stuff to stick to the dry stone and lime mortar of the wall. The first few days produced little success, but gradually I learned to make the mix stickier than the mud used for blocks and bricks, and to work my way up the wall, packing the cracks full directly from the surface of the hod (flat tray to hold the mortar) with a small trowel as I went.
As the mix improved, even Mom got into the act, chipping in on what I came to call her ceramics project. Filling the gaps between timbers above the windows defied physics and I eventually resorted to foam, but the worst part of the wall-repair project was the seven-foot stretch where the hearth had been torn out after the fire. No one bothered to make any repairs; they just studded and plastered over the blackened hole. This left a thin, fragile wall with lots of holes through to the outside for mice, bees and winter breezes, so it had to be reinforced.
Never having built a stone wall before, and confident that this one would never be seen once the sheetrock was on, I decided to buy 6″ chunks of limestone from a local quarry and have at it. Progress was slow and of indifferent quality. Then we tried laying an outer row of old bricks, and tossing rubble and mortar into the gap. This was effective, but made grave inroads into the brick supply around the property. The only part of the process which worked well was mortar production, so we finally set up permanent forms out of ¼” plywood and shoveled the cavity full of mortar and small stones. This proved relatively quick and airtight, though it was still hard to get the mix into the top 6″ of wall with a beam in the way.
It seemed logical to replace the window frames while the masonry equipment was still out. When disassembling the window panels I had been impressed with the 17″ fir boards the original builders had used to span the exposed stone between the windows and the plaster walls inside. It turned out that they had used fir as well for the actual window frames. They dovetailed together 3 X 6 inch planks for the vertical box which pushed against the stone and held the two sections of the window.
Without a supply of dry 3″ material, I had to glue up blanks from pine and treat them with preservative. This was time consuming but not difficult. I opted for long screws rather than dovetails, rationalizing that my frames were restrained on all sides by the stone walls, whereas the originals were likely used as a guide for the masons. Besides, if those old guys had had 6″ Robertson screws and a cordless drill, I’m sure they would have used them.
Perhaps the most perplexing math problem I faced on the whole renovation was preparing the thermal pane order for Healey’s Glass. Where was Mrs. Dowsett, my grade 13 algebra teacher, when I needed her?
A single window would be easy: just measure the size of the cavity, then subtract however much of the stiles and rails is left after the grooves are cut in the wood to hold the window. Subtract another 1/16 on each side for miscellaneous, 1/8 in height for the little rubber pads to support the thermal pane, and you have it.
But the windows overlap. That means two layers of window and frame at the middle of the cavity. At the planning stage, who knows how (or even whether) the thermal panes meet? What’s more, the inside window is higher up the sill, which sits on an eight degree angle. And these thermal windows are expensive, so mistakes are not in the budget. Yikes!
I put in many hours on the computer over this one, and I’m still not quite sure how they all fitted, but they did. Seems to me some of the dadoes were a bit deep, but the frames have held together for four years so far and the weather stays outside, so I can’t complain.
Without a good shaper at the time of the window construction, I used a dado head on my radial arm saw to make the grooves for the thermal panes in the sash. I still remember counting my fingers a lot that winter. A radial arm saw will do a lot of wood shaping operations (all of them dangerously) but a blind dado for a 3/4″ window is a scary operation, indeed.
When an old Poitras shaper arrived, and later a power feeder for it, my fingers positively wept with relief.
For other articles in this series check:
https://rodcroskery.wordpress.com/category/renovating-a-stone-house/
Stone House Reno: 1. Notes from the rubble
April 5, 2009
It’s been nearly five years, but it seems like yesterday that we started to empty out the old stone house attached to my parents’ home on Young’s Hill. The plan was to renovate the space and for Bet and me to move to the farm when the project was complete. We vowed to build it all, floors, doors, windows, cabinets, but first we had to clear away thirty years of accumulated stuff which filled the building.
After a summer of trips to the dump with overloaded trailers, we looked at the dark, empty house and decided to make every effort to bring natural light into the building. Partitions had to go. We settled upon a cluster of cabinets and a bathroom around the central stairwell, and the rest would be open on the main floor.
In the early seventies my dad and I had replaced the staircase, a window and a few walls when my sister moved into the house. The previous renovation had come in 1953 in the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel. The Youngs had done extensive work to the plaster, dormers and upstairs windows at that time.
According to the evidence, though, the most significant event in the life of the house had occurred long ago, during the time of square nails. At some point a major fire burned through the floors and charred half of the timbers in the house, as well as darkening the stone behind the plaster over a wide expanse of the southern wall. Apparently the fire put itself out, because wide tongue-and-groove boards were quickly nailed into place over the scorched timbers, the hearth was torn out of the west wall (leaving a huge cellar-to-attic gap behind the plaster), and new brick chimneys (and stoves, I guess) took over the heating duties.
Not until 1854 did Ontario laws change and allow a full second story to go untaxed, so upstairs the late 1830’s stone cottage had a roof line sloping down to within three feet of the floor. What’s worse, the ceilings drooped downward toward the centre of the house, increasing the claustrophobic effect.
The upstairs was also a warren of little rooms, a useless hallway, and decayed, 1950’s casement windows. We decided to gut it all, raise the ceilings with new joists, put in insulation and a good vapour barrier, and then devise a new floor and heating plan to make better use of the space.
When we started in the basement you could have thrown a cat through one hole in the northwestern corner. The cement truck operator showed me how to run concrete into the forms and then build a wooden funnel so that the wall would fill right up to the stones above the gap. It had never occurred to me that concrete won’t flow uphill.
The only real insulation around the old windows was generations of wasp nests. The wasps had done a pretty good job of filling up some large cavities behind the panels, but didn’t seem all that annoyed about having their ancestral homes removed. In three seasons of work around the wasps I don’t know of anyone who was stung. Wasps are a docile lot.
One interesting item as I tore away at the old walls was the studding and lath with which the walls were built. The hemlock studs averaged about 2X3 in profile, but the back side of each was fitted to the wall with a few chops from an axe or hatchet. A nail into the floors, top and bottom, and friction against the stone behind secured this portion of the wall until the lath went on. I would love to know from where that sawed lumber came in the late 1830’s. Some of the roof planks are 20″ white cedar, but they show the definite tooth marks of a circular saw.
To my amazement the original lath consisted of 6″ hemlock boards, split several times at one end and then nailed to the stud. The builder apparently worked his way along with the hatchet, spreading the split board as he went until it covered an area about double its width. Then the plaster oozed into the cracks in the board. I had never seen such a thing before, but Curator Anna Greenhorn was pleased to show me similar lath in a preserved ceiling of the Old Mill in Delta.
The new wall studs came courtesy of Rowswell Lumber. At the time Ed kept full-length pine logs in a beaver pond, and thus could cut stock to order. I needed a lot of 9 ½’ studs, and Ed said, “No problem.” Lacking hatchet skills, I used my trusty band saw to fit the new studs to the walls. That winter I discovered the laser. If nothing else is straight in the building and you have to start somewhere, a laser level screwed to a stud in a corner can be made to provide a vertical line from one end of the building to the other and can serve as both a line and a plumb bob if you know enough to start fitting the studs from the other end. By the time I got to the last wall, I had figured that one out.
For other articles in this series check:
https://rodcroskery.wordpress.com/category/renovating-a-stone-house/
the Walnut Diary 