fun with concrete
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!