A Solid Footing (2)

So to minimize moisture and maximize "comfort" working in a 36" crawl space it was recommended that we have a solid concrete floor. Here are the stages, including moving 10-1/2 tons of 2b gravel from a pile to the floor of the crawl space..., because the truck couldn't get close enough to dump it inside.

That's our friend Pat and my nephew Rich, hard at work. (They're smiling because we're almost done.) And here, probably the best this thing has looked since we started...

Then onto the vapor barrier. This was a 6 mil thick plastic anchored to the edges and joined at the seams with "Gorilla Tape"...

You can see the access for the well water intake in the foreground.
And finally, the concrete floor. Here we had the driver mix it up very wet, the easier to spread it around. It was at this stage that our amateur status really started to "shine"...

We had been worried that a forecast for early heavy rain would cause problems, and that we'd have to reschedule. But the rain held off. This is still "green" (not fully dried), and you can see the bridges of 2x12s we'd recovered from the forms. These are what we used to get into the middle and hand-finish the surface.

This photo is captioned "Not Great but Good"--the wrinkles and ridges shown here would remain. Eric had rented a tool called a bull float, which is a like a giant magnesium squegee that weighs about 15 lbs. and comes with a pole 15' long mounted to the head with a toothed locking swivel.

Unfortunately, this thing gets really heavy, and can actually stick to and get caught in the wet concrete (if you're not very good at this!)...and Eric broke the swivel. That meant we had to finish the floor by hand. The sun came out and it was HOT! We darn near got heat stroke, and didn't even manage to finish it all. But it's fairly level, and actually sufficiently smooth that it will work. Good thing very few people will ever see it once the house is up.