studioporn

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.