studioporn

dave and rob came over tonight to help level the floor in the studio room. we were faced with having to level out 400 square feet by mixing and pouring 4 batches of leveler mix in the shortest amount of time possible, so we optimized the whole process as much as we could. we pre-opened the bags for each batch and placed them near the part of the floor where we would ultimately pour the batch so that we could start the mixes and pour them out as quickly as possible. we also had 2 drills with mixer bit attachments going at the same time so that we could mix 2 batches in parallel. i manned the speader and smoother to get the leveler mix spread out and in position as quickly as possible while it was still flow-able. in the end, it was about 12 minutes elapsed time between the pouring of the first batch and the spreading and smoothing of the last batch.

this was definitely the best leveling pour i've been invovled with thusfar, but the end result was still far from perfect and i'll need to go back and do some touch-up this weekend. in talking with people who do this sort of stuff for a living, you really have to do several floor-leveling gigs before you really learn the ropes and develop your own techniques for making the process go as smoothly as possible. whilst picking up stuff at the floor supply place this morning, i managed to talk with a couple of guys and get some more really good advice i was able to apply to the pour we did (e.g., take the area where 2 batch pours meet and hit along the whole seam with something like the edge of a trowel to help make sure the batches flow into one another and reduce the potential for creating a hump at the seam).

i'm so close to starting on framing i can hardly contain myself

Posted by Len at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the lumber was delivered this morning. 120 pieces in all (2x4s, treated 2x4s, 2x6s, furring strips). they dropped everything off at the end of the driveway and i got to make about 20 trips getting everything into the house:

i bought a kick-ass miter saw over the weekend:

my first use of the wood and saw was to create a temporary frame around the door opening leading to the garage so i can square everything back up and put in half-blocks to make the concrete all flush with the door frame which will go in there eventually. here's the opening i started with:

after putting in the temporary frame, you can see how out of alignment each layer of block is:

you can also see the bowing of the wall near the opening, undoubtedly the result of me hitting other parts of it repeatedly with a hammer and chisel to create the opening:

i corrected the bowing at least somewhat by placing a 3' length of 2x4 against the wall at various parts and tapping it with a hammer. i'm being as careful as i can with the blocks that immediately surround the opening, as their bonds to the other blocks are already a bit weakened from the chisel action and i don't want to make the condition too much worse.

i also totally emptied out the studio room in preparation for tomorrow's floor leveling extravaganza. i just need to apply a coat of the primer solution in the morning and we should be good to go with pouring the cement in the evening.

by the power of greyskull, i will have at least one wall framed by the 4th of july.

Posted by Len at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

my concrete planer arrived yesterday:

i'm going to use this to smooth out the remaining blemishes in the floor and get everything level. the only thing sexier than a power tool is a special-purpose power tool, and this thing is awesome. i gave it a run this morning on the floor--that diamond wheel gets spinning and plows right through the cement with little effort. the only spot that's going to need work is the edge adjacent to the laundry area; when i poured the batch of crap-leveler, it built up against the 2x4 i had along that edge and so the floor slopes up there and is higher than everything else. i used the planer to level a portion of it, and it worked great but took several passes to shave it all down.

Posted by Len at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

they finished installing the interior drain system today. couldn't really get any useful pictures, so instead here's a cross-section diagram of the system:

it's a really neat system...the drain holes they put in the wall yesterday stay there; whenever water comes through any of them, it gets routed under the concrete by the plastic spacer sheet (not quite sure what to call--it's a sheet of plastic with a bunch of square nipples on it to help keep the concrete slab from touching the footer or wall, but to allow water to pass through). then it passes through the gravel and into the drain. and when the water level rises from a storm or whatever, any water that tries to come up through the earth below will also find its way into the drain.

one unanticipated bonus of this system: since the concrete slab never touches the wall, that helps with the soundproofing by eliminating the flanking path that would otherwise exist between the two.

the only tricky issue is that the new concrete they laid down isn't as thick as the slab, plus the drain pipe doesn't sit terribly deep. this means that when i'm framing walls that pass over the drain, i can't use nails or screws. fortunately, nothing in the main room ever runs parallel to the drain, so i only have to worry about those places where it crosses over. the exterior wall shared by the vox booth and the storage room will have parallel-to-drain issues, but i'm entirely sure i'm going to frame along that wall anyway. i may just do furring strips instead.

Posted by Len at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the excavation phase of the basement waterproofing happened today. they trenched along about 2/3 of the non-garage exterior walls and dug the pit for the sump pump.

here's how it looks along the front wall of the house:

and where the fireplace used to be:

it's kind of funny how all the concrete i poured in there ended up coming right back out. they had to trench along the front of the fireplace since the footer extends out to there. otherwise they could've just run right along the wall.

all along the wall they drilled drain holes into the base of the concrete block to drain out water that had accumulated inside the cavities:

they got quite a bit of water out of the side wall, as evidenced by the trench in front of the fireplace footer:

after the fireplace, the trench passes under the load-bearing wall and then makes a 90 degree turn to head towards the perimeter wall:

then it goes right under the water heater (sorry this one is so blurry):

here's a cool pic of it tunneling under the water heater:

and lastly, here's the sump pit in the far corner of the house:

i grabbed a shovel and lowered it into the water to see how deep it went; there's at least 12-14" of water there, plus the inch or so of water running along most of the trenches.

they also excavated the ground outside along the side of the house to install the french-drain-like contraption for the outside. between these two solutions, we should have a pretty water-tight studio. i'll still have to tackle the back wall at some point, but the problems there are much more minor and are much more easily fixable from the outside.

Posted by Len at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

one thing i kept putting off until tonight was the question of where to put the bathroom door. the plans thusfar have all had the door in a default location, which kind of works except for the fact that it gets in the way of the other things i have planned for that area (some sort of table surface with a microwave, coffee machine, etc.). on the other hand, sticking the door on the other wall has its own complications since i have to work with an existing 28" run of concrete block. to preserve all that block and then frame out a door along that wall would make for a rather large powder room (and somewhere between the block wall and the door i'd want to have enough framing to do a recessed double junction box for lights and the mandatory sink-area GFCI). i decided to go back to one of my earlier ideas, which was to frame the door at an angle.

this allows me to have enough framed wall adjacent to the concrete block to do the recessed electrical stuff, keeps the door free of the table area, and makes for a sanely-sized bathroom overall. an added bonus to the angling is it gives a couple of square feet back to the lounge and gives a slightly more open feeling to the space as a whole.

Posted by Len at 02:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i loaded up the sawzall with a tungsten-carbide blade and tackled the funky drain pipe in the floor. the drain pipe is iron and is really thick, not to mention pretty big (3"), so it took a good 20-25 minutes to chop through all of it. here's the extracted piece.

i grabbed a 3" rubber cap for the remaining stub and got it nice and tight around it:

then i tossed a bit of coarse gravel into the hole and filled in the rest with concrete (yes, i know, i'm the sloppiest concrete person ever. at least my floating skills are getting marginally better):

meanwhile, back at the ranch, the floor primer in the lounge/bathroom area finally dried and stacey and i mixed and poured the ardex K-15 leveler to fix the problems of the crappy-ass leveler we got from home depot. i came more prepared this time. i bought a pair of cleats so i could slosh through the pour without messing anything up. i decided sort of at the last minute that a gauge rake would be extremely helpful in getting a nice even spread. but it's a little hard to locate such a contraption oon a sunday morning, so i made a ghetto gauge rake--we roamed the hardware aisle of home depot until i found these little window-lock contraptions that i could totally bastardize and screw onto each end of my concrete spreader to lift it about 1/8" off the ground.

since the instructions call for mixing 2 55-lb. bags for each batch, we got a couple of heavy-duty plastic trash cans to hold each batch. fortunately, the space is small enough that we were able to do the whole floor with 2 batches. once it hits the ground, you only have a few minutes to work the stuff before it starts to set. so we had to work really quickly, especially given that we were trying to fix a horribly-uneven floor and had to work around all sorts of obstacles like the water main and the space around the toilet drain. a few hours later, the floor was dry to the point where i could walk on it (nevermind the wavy gray look along the base of each wall--that's just an artifact of me aggressively spreading the leveler toward the walls and it sinking back down to find its level):

overall, this stuff worked great. however, the trash cans we bought aren't flush at the bottom, so in both batches we ended up with small-ish chunks of cement that didn't fully mix with the water. after pouring, i pulled out the bigger chunks by hand, but a bunch of smaller ones still made it into the pour, giving this sort of concrete measles look in certain areas. also, i didn't quite work quickly enough to spread everything out before it stopped flowing. so there are a few level blemishes throughout the floor, but they're extremely minor compared to the lumpy set of the other crap we used. i'll probably just go through with a chisel and knock out any chunks, and then do some spot leveling of any remaining level inconsistencies.

Posted by Len at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the original plan for today had been to pour the new floor leveler in the lounge/bathroom area. however, i applied the floor primer a little before noon and as of about 7am it still hadn't fully dried yet. yay humid basements. so we're going to try again tomorrow morning.

in the meantime, i decided to tackle the drain pipe in the floor of the studio left over from the mondo bar. as luck would have it, our contractor was over today working on our new kitchen and he let me borrow his hammer drill and his sawzall to help with this endeavor.

i've never had to cut through concrete slab before, so this was pretty exciting. i loaded up the hammer drill with a mason drill bit and set it on the hammer-and-drill mode. then i drilled a whole bunch of holes all the way through the concrete and attacked the area with my hand sledge and chisel. it's kind of surreal the first time you poke through your basement and hit dirt, this feeling of holding soil in your hands and realizing this may very well be the first and last time you're touching the stuff underneath your house. here's how the area around the drain pipe looks now:

the next step is to lop off the top of the drain pipe. i have to get in under that weird flange thing with the sawzall and cut through the iron pipe there and then throw a rubber cap on the pipe. i picked up a couple of tungsten carbide blades for the sawzall tonight to help with this.

in other masonry news, i removed some more concrete block between the garage and the studio to make more room for framing studs around the doorway which will eventually go there. i'm trying to make sure i leave at least 8-9 inches on either side of the door so i can have enough space to properly frame in the cripple studs above the doorway and all that. one thing i hadn't checked before today was whether the various layers of concrete block line up. they don't. i put a 2x4 along one side of the opening and all of the blocks are a good 1-2" off from one another. i still have to put in half-blocks on every other layer to make a rectangular opening, so probably what i'll do is frame some temporary 2x4's through the opening (making sure everything's square and level, of course) and then use a combination of concrete block, mortar, slivers of concrete block, and maybe some cement to get everything flush with the 2x4's.

and this of course is a roundabout way of making an excuse to buy some sawhorses and a chop saw! woohoo!

Posted by Len at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i spent some time a couple of weeks back trying some radically different designs, but none of them really panned out and i kept coming back to the basic layout of design #2. after some minor tweaks, here's how it currently looks:

here i got more consistent with my room-within-a-room framing for the main room. also, i incorporated some of rod gervais's door design concepts to provide single-door entry to the vox booth and storage room (more on that later). i also decided to give in and put the door to the storage room in the studio rather than in the vocal booth. i know it'll screw up L/R symmetry around the mix position, but i'm hedging my bets on that being a relatively minor flaw and that whatever acoustic shortcomings it might present will be greatly outweighed by the convenience factor.

Posted by Len at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

civil engineer finally came out this morning to look at the two places where we have water coming into the basement. sounds like the root problem is that the terra cotta perimeter drain is cracked, clogged, or otherwise inoperable and during heavier rains the water level is coming up higher than the level of the basement. so, no really major surprises in terms of the culprit.

we can either fix this problem externally or internally. externally, they would dig down to the foundation all along the side of the house, remove the old drain, install new PVC piping, pack it in with gravel, fill the ditch back in, grade away from the house, and then dig an equally-long ditch in the backyard to lay the drain runoff. this involves a ton of digging and, since there's no way to get any machinery up to that part of the property, they'd have to do it all with shovels. which translates to a price tag of $13-14k.

the other option is to fix it internally. essentially, they'll dig out a trench along the perimeter wall on the inside, deeper than the current perimeter drain. then they install what's more or less an interior french drain which flows all water into a sump pump, and fill the trench back in with concrete. this costs about $4k and only takes 2-3 days to install.

both solutions have their pros and cons, but given that the external solution costs 3-4 times what the internal one costs, we're inclined to go with the latter. added bonus: they can start work on this next monday.
the sooner they get this resolved, the better, seeing as how i can't start on any studio construction until this problem goes away.

Posted by Len at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i laid down the floor leveling today. unfortunately, home depot doesn't carry the stuff i wanted and i ended up getting this quick-set stuff. turns out this stuff starts setting before it finds its level. GAH! what a waste! no matter what i did i couldn't get it to smooth out. a minute after pouring the stuff, if i poked a section of the poured area with the squeegee, the impression would stay and harden that way.

i tried putting down a second layer to smooth things out a bit, but i just made it worse. things also ended up a bit thicker than they should be. we tried adding more water to the mixture to make it a little more runny, but that didn't seem to help. i'm trying to decide now whether to track down of the better mixtures that spend hours finding their level, or rip this up and start from scratch or what.

Posted by Len at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

nothing major to report. i was out of commission yesterday due to some sort of infection which was causing my throat to swell up. what should've been a 3 hour ER visit or thereabouts turned into 9 hours, thanks to UPMC switching to a completely new computer system this week which was confusing everything, plus stupid little things like the lab losing the blood samples that were taken from me. joy.

anyway, my throat's doing much better today and while i wait for the comcast guy and the carpet-measuring guy to show up, i'm prepping the lounge/bathroom area of the basement for pouring the leveling mixture. with any luck i'll get everything poured this afternoon and be able to take some nice photos tonight.

we have a civil engineer coming out on friday morning to assess the water problems we've been having. i've been told by people in the trade that these companies that specialize in this kind of stuff charge an arm and a leg to do the same type of repairs that one can do on one's own. which is pretty much what i suspected, but given the proximity to the neighbor's property and all her concerns, doing it ourselves isn't really much of a choice if we want to get off on the right foot. i was talking with our mason today, and he says probably what they'll do, which is very similar to what i was going to do this past weekend, is dig down to the foundation, cover the entire exterior wall with portlant cement and continue this down to the foundation and make it curve away from the house to provide a lip of sorts, cover all of this with tar, fill the dirt back in, and maybe provide some sort of ground covering. grading away from the house may or may not be necessary (or doable, seeing as how this would require altering the neighbor's yard), same thing with french drains.

Posted by Len at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

bleah. so on friday i went over to the house to do some work and found a huge pool of water in the basement. apparently all that rain we got brought more water down to the foundation than usual. further inspection of the side of the house revealed that the neighboring yard is sloped towards ours and there's a depression right around where we're seeing the leakage. i'm not sure that this counts for all of the water, but it's at least one culprit. all said, i ended up sucking up around 20 gallons of water with my shopvac throughout the course of the evening.

the plan had been to dig down about 8 feet to the foundation, drain out the water that has accumulated down there (we already know that there's water inside the bottom few layers of concrete block around the problem area), and fill this back in with a slope away from and towards the rear of the house. however, the weather kind of turned against us today. and we discussed this plan with our neighbor and she's concerned that in doing this we may end up just pushing more water back onto her property. in the interest of being a good neighbor, i'm gonna have someone come out there and look at it with both of us to see if we can find a solution that meets everyone's needs. which of course is going to push the start of the main studio construction back to god knows when.

in other news, we started preparing the lounge/bathroom area for floor leveling so i can at least make some progress there while we figure out what to do about the water leakage. we sealed off the shower drain and got the floor all clean, which gets us most of the way there. we picked up 10 bags of the self-leveling mix as well as a power mixer for my spiffy new heavy-duty drill since the leveling stuff can't be mixed by hand. i'm hoping to pour all the stuff tomorrow night so it'll be ready before the end of the week when people start coming in to do the kitchen installation upstairs.

Posted by Len at 07:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)