We’re getting closer and closer to a pour day. No REALLY, we are! (In the photo we’re lowering the compactor into the patio area to compact the base rock.)

I’ve got an inspection scheduled for Monday (hoping to change it to tomorrow). The concrete pump guy is scheduled for Tuesday with two finishers. I still have to set up the concrete order for Tuesday. But I think it might really happen Tuesday, though rain is forecast, so who knows.

We’ve been working on the patio stairs this week. I bought a huge block of polystyrene and shaped it to fit in the big hole under the stairs.

Then I reattached the stringer to the wall, marked, drilled, and cleaned holes for the rebar for the stair risers.

Chet cut and I installed rebar for the new wall to the right side as you ascend the stairs.

Then we cut rebar for the back retaining wall of the patio stairs and drilled the holes it will go into in the existing retaining wall.

THEN… we took EVERYTHING out and staged it. When we open up the epoxy that will attach the rebar ends into the holes in the concrete, we have about 45 min before it sets up solid. So we have to epoxy in the horizontal rebar in for the back wall, attach the vertical rebar, place the polystyrene and glue it together, epoxy the rebar for the stair risers, twist them and tie them to the rebar in the right had wall, then epoxy the rebar at the shop stairs landing to finish up the tube.

So we mixed the epoxy and started assembling the stairs. Despite a major malfunction of our caluking gun(S), we managed to get everything in the right place before the epoxy set up. We ended up going through two tubes of epoxy (they cost $20 each so that’s why we don’t want to waste them), but everything ended up fine.

Then we cut and placed the rest of the wood and the wedge ties for the right side wall. We attached steel stakes to the inside wall of the stair forms to bring the wood into alignment. Finally, Chet ripped and I cut and he fit and attached the riser forms to the stairs.

Et viola! The stairs are ready for the pour.

Since that all went so well, Chet decided to RECUT FIVE RISERS for the shop stairs because we had a 3/4″ narrowing of the stairway because of a small leaning of one wall that we hadn’t diagnosed when we put in the FIRST set of risers many weeks ago. I reluctantly assisted and it was all REDONE in a few hours. I also cut and assembled some polystyrene for the shop landing slab and then placed base rock behind it to create the base for the slab.

I ordered and picked up the rebar for the patio slab. We’ve used up almost all the leftover rebar from the foundation wall with relatively little waste. We’ll place that rebar tomorrow and attach the final two pieces of form board to the shop landing.

Out two remaining tricky tasks are:

(1) Assemble and install the trench drain for the shop landing.

(2) Attach the steel grate (for the sump pit) frame in a sturdy way so that the frame sits at the proper final elevation and enclose the area under it to keep the concrete out of the sump pit.

Hopefully we’ll get it all done before inspection time! Hopefully we’ll pass inspection. Hopefully I’ll get the concrete order right. Hopefully the rain will hold off and we’ll pour on Tuesday.

Then I have to get serious about building sets for the opera. Yikes!

We’ve made a little progress during winter break. The girls are getting many chances to “help.” Here they are keeping a piece of plywood on the worktable while Chet cuts out a form piece for the patio stairs.

The patio stairs will be built right along the foundation wall. Because of this, the patio stairs fall half in the overcut – so there is no dirt under them for half their width, and no dirt at the top end. So we have to build up some forms to create the outside corner.

Also, we don’t want to fill in the whole overcut void under the stairs with concrete. We’d planned on making cages out of metal lathe and filling them with baserock, but Paul Jr told us to get big blocks of polystyrene.

It took a full day to chase down materials for the next phase of stair form construction. First, I needed to find big 4×4 (foot) chunks of polystyrene. Finally located some at Pacific Foam. Nice folks.

Second, we had a waterproofing plan for all the wall area OUTSIDE the stair footprint, but needed to waterproof the foundation wall BELOW the stairs BEFORE the pour. Paul Jr. recommended a product called Red Guard (which I couldn’t find). The waterproofing distributor (Lowry’s in Hayward) convinced me to use a product called Aquafin-2K/M (remains flexible, rock veneer can go on top).

Before we could put the 2K/M on though, we had to clean the wall and fill in any holes with mortar. We did this yesterday and let it alone to dry for 24hrs. We then turned to installing a 2″ line for the sump pit. This line had to go through a 3″ ABS sleeve in the footing. There is a huge water path between the 3″ sleeve and the 2″ pipe inside it and we realized we needed to somehow waterproof this gap. We finally came up with the idea of using a 3×2 bushing between the 3″ and 2″ pipes. If we cut off the “stop” (the area of plastic in the bushing that stops the smaller pipe at a distance of 3/4″ from the outside of the bushing) built into the bushing, we could hypothetically slide it along the 2″ pipe far enough to fit a coupling on behind it, we could then glue the bushing to the 2″ pipe. Then we could slide the whole assemblage into the 3″ pipe and glue the bushing into the pipe. This would then seal up our opening while allowing our 2″ pipe to go through the 3″ pipe. Genius!! The trick would be first cutting the stop off the bushing and then seeing if we could get it to slide along the pipe.

After a number of false starts we found that a rough metal file and elbow grease were the best tools to remove the plastic creating the stop inside the bushing. Once the stop was gone, we carefully dry fit the pipe into the bushing. It seemed like it would fit, but we probably had to lubricate the pipe with something. Chet had the final brainstorm to just use glue and have the coupling ready to slap onto the end of the pipe as soon as we had the bushing slid into place along the pipe. It worked like a charm. We then assembled the rest of the pipe components and made a good guess at where to drill the hole. We confirmed level on the whole thing and Chet filled in the trench with drain rock. With this step done, the patio is ready to receive a 3-4″ layer of compacted 3/4″ base rock (which is sitting tarped in the back yard).

Today with the mortar dry and rain predicted tomorrow, I wanted to get the waterproofing 2-K/M stuff on the wall so it had 3 hrs to dry before being hit by rain. I was a bit uncertain – but motivated by the coming rain – so I mixed up my first batch of 2-K/M. It is a gluey liquid mixed with a cementaceous powder – like a concrete glue. I applied it with a big masonry brush in two layers. I’d hoped to do it in one layer, but the brush puts it on fairly thin. We’d decided to waterproof the whole wall along the stairs and ALL concrete that would be covered up in the impending pour.

So it is done and dry and ready for any rain that might come our way.

The girls were DESPERATE to try out their new cameras on a subject NOT around the house, so they convinced us to visit the Oakland Zoo today.

We’d planned on today as a workday, but then decided to stay inside with the girls. We played games during the morning. The negotiations began around lunch, so we agreed if the girls did their Holiday Homeshcool Homework (spelling, math, music), we’d go to the zoo.

They IMMEDIATELY jumped up and got going on the homework and then we had to keep our end of the bargain and get our lazy butts out into the cold and drive up to the zoo.

It was a nice quiet day at the zoo. We only had two hours to visit, but made the most of it. The girls got to use their cameras and run about. Catie took a very nice photo of me & Chet that I like quite alot. Not bad for a couple of old farts, eh?

We were so happy that Chet came home this morning. We’d feared that he could catch a mandatory overtime and be missing for xmas eve AND day, but home he came and early to boot!

The girls awoke at 5:30am and I kept them in bed till 7am (I’d been up till 3:30am like an idiot!). They got to open their stockings before daddy got home, but had to wait for everything else. We barely got through the stockings when Chet showed up – he’d took advantage of an early relief as he was ready to hit the road when his replacement walked through the door at 7:30am.

The girls were beyond excitement and tore through their gifts. Catie is really developing some amazing sweetness and appreciation for each gift. Beck is still in tear through everything in sight mode.

While I got lunch going, Chet and the girls cleaned up the living room. Paul and family arrived at 11:45am. The turkey was out, but the potatoes were still not done, so we ended up eating at 12:30pm. I’d cooked or prepared almost everything the day before, set the table, etc, etc. So it was very little work (relatively) to pull a full meal together by noon.

We had a really nice visit with Paul & family. Paul loved his Stokes ladder (we were hoping he would). We get to babysit it while he is visiting PaPa and TaTa. Maybe he’ll forget to come pick it up. Har.

We spent the rest of the day playing games (new Bingo game) and doing puzzles. A very peaceful, pleasant day. I usually want 20+ people for the holidays, but having just 8 was really very nice too.

Some kids get to go to Hawaii over their winter holidays. Ours get to stay home and pick up chunks of concrete.

The girls ran out of nails and screws to pick up at a penny a piece and were asking for another money-making chore. Chet came up with a great one – clear out all the concrete chunks and chips in the basement.

They’re getting one dollar a bucket and so far they’ve picked up six buckets. There is much more concrete in 3″-ish sizes that they are less interested in picking up. I imagine they’ll get interested again one day before we really need it all up.

While the girls were clearing concrete with their bare hands (!), Chet and I excavated the area where the patio stairs will be (that was on the 21st). Well, I did the excavation and dirt-in-bucket hauling and Chet stood around watching and taking a wheelbarrow of dirt away every so often. Lazy boy.

Chet worked the 22rd, so on the 23rd we started building up the stairway forms. We got the outside wall built and the second stringer in despite having to redo the top outside form FOUR FREAKING TIMES and we even RAN OUT OF LUMBER in the middle of the whole mess. But the forms are up and square now and we’ll just forget that little piece of the journey. Crikey.

Because the patio stairs sit half over undisturbed soil and half over the overcut for the foundation wall, there is a huge void (under the stairs in the overcut) that we’d rather not fill with yards of concrete. We’d planned on building boxes of metal lathe and filling them with 3/4″ baserock, so I ordered baserock for a Saturday morning delivery. Of course, brother Paul (who came for Christmas lunch with his family) had a MUCH better idea for how to fill in the huge void, so we don’t need all the baserock that was delivered right NOW. We’ll use it when we build up the basement slab.

We got the drain pipe and drain rock leveled, glued, wraped, and laid in the area that will be the stairway and now we’re ready to form up the rest of the stairs. But that will have to wait until after the holiday.

Catie has been desperate to visit the San Francisco Zoo. To date, she’s been asking at times AFTER 2pm in the afternoon. I told her that we needed to leave the house at 9am to get up to SF and see the zoo.

A day finally presented itself and Chet was even home, so off we went to explore the zoo. Catie was in heaven and the zoo was quite deserted. We got there at 10:15am and left at closing time (4pm) in a slight drizzle. Otherwise we had fantastic sunny (if cold) weather.

We saw polar bear, grizzlys, sun bear, eland, giraffe, zebra, lowland gorillas, a variety of lemurs, tamarins, penguins, lion, tigers, a DUIKER, black swans, rhinos, and more.

All in all a very nice day at the zoo.

Becky asked to take ballet again this school year. She’d joined the class about a month before the end of school last year, so was unable to participate in the summer show. But THIS year, she joined up not too late (BAD mommy!) and was able to be part of the holiday recital. Catie chose not to join ballet this year because: (1) she doesn’t like to stretch, and (2) she doesn’t like to wear tights.

Beck concentrated hard and within a couple of weeks before the recital was moved to the front line (center) so she could help lead the younger girls. She was VERY proud of this. When recital day arrived, she told me she was feeling shy but also very excited.

She did great and we all went out to the coffee shop for a post-recital celebratory hot cocoa. There happened to be a radio troupe at the coffee shop about to perform The Christmas Carol, so we stayed to watch and listen. Catie immediately fell asleep and Becky performed a Stage Three Meltdown, so the night ended less happily than one might have expected.

“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!” – A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

It’s not easy to giftwrap a sump pit, but I’m doing my best.

We had such a rare day – we actually COMPLETED the task we set out to do!! We’ve probably had this experience a handful of times since the beginning of the project. What a lovely feeling to actually finish the job we’d hoped to do on the day we planned to do it. Feels GREAT!!

We carefully placed the first stringer for the patio stairs and screwed it to the concrete foundation wall. This set the slab level. Using this level as a reference point, we located where the sump basin should go and figured how much to cut off it. Then we removed a little more dirt from the patio floor to level it out a bit.

The photo really shows me lining the sump pit with landscaping fabric. This fabric should keep silt out of the sump pit. After the fabric was in, we filled the bottom 3″ or so of the pit with drain rock, placed the tub in it, cut holes in the basin for the pipes (AMAZINGLY the first set of holes worked – really that was AMAZING!!), put the basin in the hole, filled in around the outside with many buckets of drain rock, gathered the fabric together over the sump basin and covered the whole thing with a big piece of plywood (to protect it from rain) to await inspection (scheduled for Thursday).

We finished gluing up the window well 2″ pipe and made a hole for it in the sump pit and filled in its trench with drain rock. Finally, we glued up the electrical conduit that will get burried in the patio base rock (under the slab) and ran it out to the sump pit.

Chet goes back to work tomorrow and we’ll get back to work on Saturday hopefully. Some rain expected tomorrow, but otherwise clear weather forecast. The patio stairs are next and they look fairly straight forward save for one thing. We’ll get to that in good time, no doubt.

Having completed our task for the day by 3pm, we tidied up the basement after I brought the girls home from school. Things were getting WAY out of hand down there with scraps of every imaginable building product piling up, cords everywhere, and tools tucked willy nilly into corners. All in all a very satisfying day for a change.

We really are still working on the house, but we’ve been stuck in Wait! First We Have To Do This Other Thing Before We Do The First Thing Land for the last couple of weeks.

The situation which isn’t helped by Chet’s absence due to many trade paybacks. He had a run of four work days last week during the cold, cold weather.

We’ve also had a bit of rain to work around. The main problem with the rain is protecting the rebar as the trench around the house seems to be doing just fine and we finally have a solid downspout system in place to route roof water away from the trench.

Waaayyyyy back in early November, we thought we were going to waterproof the foundation, but first…

• We needed to hook up the sewer, so…
• We dug a huge hole in the front yard and hooked up the sewer, but couldn’t backfill because we haven’t waterproofed the foundation, but…
• We couldn’t waterproof the foundation till the stairwells were built to complete the exterior retaining wall and hold back the drain rock (and as long as we’re pouring the stairs, we may as well pour the shop landing and patio floor) so…
• We excavated a big slidey area for stairs and started framing them up, but…
• We couldn’t finish framing the shop stairs because we had to plumb the foundation drain that must run under the stairs and the shop landing drain, but…
• We didn’t like a small 2″ circular drain in the landing (not big enough) so we had to figure out how to build a trench drain, but…
• The plastic trench drain grates are uglier than you can believe, so we had to find something pretty, and we actually were able to find the trench drain base and order the grates and have them arrive in “time” (becuase you have to have them in when you pour), but we can’t install the trench drain till we backfill the shop landing area,  and…
• We can’t backfill the shop landing area till we place rock on the patio (only want to rent the compactor for one day), and…
• We can’t place rock on the patio till the sump pit is dug and constructed, so…
• We finally had to tackle the sump pit design and that meant learning about sump pumps (Who knew they actually have CORDS and you generally run an 1-1/2″ conduit for the cord instead of the 3/4″ conduit WE ran?), because…
• Sump pumps need a certain area to fit in so their water indication arm can raise (but we’re getting a vertical float), and that determines the size of the sump pit, but…
• We should probably make the pit big enough for two (or three???) pumps, and how in the name of everything holey are we going to frame this crazy thing so we can pour concrete and still get the form boards off the FOUR different PIPES that go through them, so…
• Let’s look at concrete precast (WAY to expensive), corrugated double-wall 24″ pipe ($313/10′ and HUGE), pre-made 12″ stacking sump pit boxes ($279 a FOOT), our green waste BIN??? (clever, convenient, cheap, the right size… hmmmm… but we don’t have the guts to cut it up), and finally, a poly-something sewer basin (see photo above) that we’ll cut down to size and drill holes in the right places, but…
• Again with the grate question. The plastic ones are hideous, the standard cast iron ones are too heavy and industrial looking, so… Iron Age (too heavy), Urban Accessories (still too heavy and expensive), and IronSmith (48 lbs, good design, sturdy installation flange, reasonable prices). We have a WINNER!!, so…
• Now we know to dig a 32×32″ hole about 30″ deep, but back to the shop stairs that still aren’t done, so…
• Measure, figure, measure, figure, measure, figure, and place the 3″ foundation drain under the stairs (can’t be too low so that it can flow to the fixed pipe to the sump, can’t be too high and interfere with stairs), and temprarily place the 2″ trench drain (we have all the pieces now) assemblage so that we can locate the 2″ window well drain pipe under the stairs. With that all in place, we can…
• Place the last piece of form board on the outside stair forms, then stake the inside forms to carry some of their load and align the boards, place the risers, stiffen the inside forms, place kickers, but we can’t build the landing till we have the compactor, so…
• Back over to the patio, let’s figure out the patio stairs (measure, figure, measure, figure), cut a stair stringer, locate the stringer on the existing house wall that the stairs will rise along to be sure I didn’t screw anything up, and…

That’s where we are now! We’ve decided to get the stringer on the wall, then go back to the sump pit and build it up before we eliminate our existing entry point to the basement. Then we’ll get the under patio slab plumbing inspected (this weeek I hope), and then we can take out our temporary stairs (new access across a bridge over the trench and down a ladder into the patio!!), build up the patio stair forms, build up the patio slab rock & rebar, meet with the concrete guys, get and inspection, and pour. That will be so cool to have real stairs. Let’s hope there are no more surprises along the way….

Ha. Ha.

It’s been a cold week here in Lake My-Heater-B-Gone. Now, I know it is REALLY cold where some of you live, but we’re talking about cold INSIDE the house – below 40 most of the week. Outside it was in the 40’s during the day and below freezing at night. When we removed the heater & all the duct work, and excavated a huge, open-air hole under the house, we knew it would be a cold winter. Now we’re enjoying the results!! The girls are learning what a SOCK is and what SWEATERS are for.

Unfortunately, almost all the outlets in the house are wired to the SAME circuit, so we have to be very careful about using space heaters. On cold days we live in the kitchen. We put Kitty & Jaime’s heater in the kitchen in the morning, put Mom & Dad’s heater in the laundry area, pointing it toward the kitchen and let them run with the kitchen door closed. The temp will rise and we’ll be reasonably comfy.

In the evening, we put K&J’s heater between the bedrooms and M&D’s heater up in Catie’s bed for 20 min or so. This will take the chill out of the air. When Catie gets in bed, we switch the heater down to Becky till she falls asleep, then turn the heaters off. Unless it’s below freezing. Then we leave K&J’s heater on all nite between the bedrooms to keep much of the chill away.

(image taken from http://my.execpc.com/~icicle/ICICLE.html)