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so even though the studio is far from done, i still have to move all the gear into the new house before the end of this month when the lease is up at our old place. i'm gonna rent a truck wednesday evening and load up everything.
anyone wanna help?
sorry i've been radio silent the past week. not much to update on the studio proper, but lots of tangentially-related things going on:
the movers moved us into the house yesterday and we're now living here, which means it'll be considerably easier now for me to get more studio work done.
we spent all day today dealing with house wiring stuff. i replaced nearly all of the remaining 2-prong outlets in the house with 3-prong ones (thank god the house is at least new enough to have all grounded wiring). also fixed a couple of switches which had been installed upside down. then it was on to running datacom, since this wiring all has to pass over the studio area and needs to be done before any serious construction happens down there. each room is getting 2 ethernet jacks and a coax jack for cable. we've run 10 cat5e lines and 3 cable lines thusfar, and when all is said and done there'll be about 14 and 5, respectively. all the wiring's running into the laundry room area, where there's an 8U wall rack with 16-port cat5e patch panel, 16-port gigabit switch, and ultimately the router and modem will be down there along with a coax distribution unit. i knew our ceilings were plaster, but i was pleasantly surprised to discover that all of the walls appear to be drywall. this made cutting the holes soooo much easier. the only plaster i had to contend with was the ceilng in the garage, where i had to poke a few holes in to shoot up into the walls above.
carpeting was installed on thursday. one of the main reasons for installing carpeting in the house is to help with the studio soundproofing--carpeting and padding helps reduce things like footfall noise from passing down into the studio, and also helps attenuate studio noises which would otherwise travel up through the floor. we went for density in both the padding and carpeting to help with sound transmission loss. while the 8-lb. padding we got is better in this regard than the standard 6 lb. padding used for residential carpeting, i found some commercial-grade padding after the fact with much higer densities, like 16 or even 22 lbs. while it would have been kinda cool to get something like that, the stuff we got should be more than adequate.
our kitchen is like 95% done now--electricians finished up everything but the lights on thursday, plumber came on friday and did the sink, garbage disposal, dishwasher, and fixed at least one of the problems with the drain pipe going down into the basement. at some point someone drilled holes in the top and bottom of the pipe, presumably to unclog it. they screwed a frankenstein bolt into the top hole and in all honesty it looks like they just shoved a wad of paper into the bottom hole. rob removed this whole stretch of pipe, replaced it with ABS pipe, and added a cleanout we can use for any future clogs. damn older houses not having any cleanouts. he's coming back this week to run the gas line for the stove, at which point we'll have a fully-functional kitchen.
i started framing the studio bathroom, but haven't finished it yet--had to put things on hold while we deal with the kitchen drain stuff, as the bathroom wall is tenatively going to run right next to it and i need to leave that space accessible until everything's fixed. there's still a remaining problem with this drain--there's a small leak right where it goes into the floor. hopefully rob will be able to fix this on tuesday when he comes to do the gas line, then i can permanently attach the wall i've already built and then crank out the other new wall. i had to punt my plans for doing the doorway-at-an-angle design--after running the numbers, i found that this would cause the doorway to run straight through the supply register that's coming down from the ceiling.
i got my soybean mastic remover yesterday and worked on the floor last night and this morning. nitin came over last night to help me and we poured the stuff out on the floor and i spread it out with a push broom to cover the whole floor without being too thick. we waited about an hour and then started getting the stuff back up. it was really nice not having to worry about ventilation during this whole process and this stuff had a pleasant orange smell.
the company's literature says that after their stuff sits for a while and pulls up the mastic, things will have the consistency of "very old motor oil." my hunch, which was proven correct last night, was that the consistency would actually be closer to what one would see if 5000 rednecks from alabama all congregated in our basement with chewing tobacco.
we picked up a 35-lb container of cat litter to assist with the cleanup. my initial plan was to squeegee everything into one area and then toss the litter on top to absorb it all, but i found it really hard to adequately move all that goop with the squeegee. what we ended up doing instead was sprinkling the litter all over the floor and pushing the litter with the squeegee, letting it absorb the goop as it moved along. this worked amazingly well, but did leave a whole lot of litter morsels on the floor that we had to deal with later.
while we were waiting for the mastic remover to do its thing, we went out to home depot and i bought a pressure washer. the initial plan had been to pressure wash the floor last night to clean up all the remaining residue, but i ended up getting a gas model and by the time we were ready to start this part of the cleaning it was past 10pm so i decided to wait until morning. i'm glad i did, as we found out today that this little bugger is LOUD.
we sprayed the floor with a standard pressure washer cleaning detergent and then pressure washed everything. in a perfect world, i would've had us go really slowly with the pressure washer and get every last bit up, but given that the now-defunct floor drain in this part of the basement has already been sealed up, this would have generated quite a bit of water to contend with. instead, stacey manned the sprayer and did the back-and-forth at a less OCD pace. she started at the end furthest from the laundry area and then worked her way towards it, steering everything towards the functioning floor drain in there. i followed up afterwards with a mop. because i have some sort of weird fetish for wet mops and suspect that in another life i was stanley spadowski.
i was an idiot and forgot to take some pictures before i left the house, but the end result is that the floor went from a black color to more of a light brown. in talking with the asbestos contractor who was at our house way back when, it sounds like all mastic removers leave floors this color--it all comes down to the whole mastic-concrete interaction. not that i particularly care how it looks, as the bathroom will be tiled and the lounge area will have some sort of yet-to-be-determined floor covering. there are still a few spots that have a bit of mastic on them, but i think we can live with this seeing as how the vast majority is now gone.
i've been feeling increasingly uneasy about the leveled floor in the lounge/bathroom area ever since a couple of weeks ago when i noticed that around one of the doorways it had formed a really poor bond with the floor below and a chunk of it actually broke off wihle i was tapping out the 2x4 that had been in the doorway providing an edge for the floor.
i've been suspecting more and more that the rest of the floor might have a similarly weak bond, what with this being that first crap-ass brand leveler i used and all. rather than find this out the hard way a year from now, i decided to play it safe and just rip up the leveled floor. which, as i've mentioned previously, never came out all that level anyway and has caused me nothing but grief.
i hooked up a chisel bit to my awesome new hammer drill (yes, i've purchased 3 drills since we bought this house) and started hitting spots on the floor at the point where the concrete floor and leveled floor meet, at a really small angle to the floor. my suspicions proved correct, as the majority of the floor started coming up with barely any chiseling. at one point, i managed to pull up an intact chunk roughly 12" x 18". call me cynical, but i'd say the primer i applied to the floor prior to the leveling didn't do shit.
so right now i'm about halfway done removing the floor, and i need to start thinking about what to do with the mastic residue and also how best to deal with the floor area where one of the bathroom walls will go, since the wall will be right over where the shower used to be and that part of the floor is pretty heavily sloped towards the old floor drain.
no definitive solution to the floor-sloping issue yet, but i have made some progress on solving the mastic issue. way back when i was removing the tile in the studio, i started researching various floor solvents but quickly abandoned that endeavor when i realized that most of the things i turned up were highly flammable and/or gave off all sorts of nasty fumes. well, this week i stumbled across a newer breed of floor solvents made from soybeans. yes, soybeans. these things have a high flash point (usually around 450F for the stuff i was looking at) and are nontoxic/noncaustic.
one of the more frequently-occuring names in this market is franmar and so i decided to order their mastic remover product, which i should have by the end of the week. it looks like the part where you remove the mastic from the floor is a no-brainer: you pour the stuff, let it sit for an hour or so, and then you can just push the mastic away from the floor with a squeegee. but one of the trade-offs of this being environmentally-friendly and all is that cleanup and disposal is a bit more of a hassle than traditional chemicals. you basically end up with a floor covered with this goopy stuff which is about the consistency of motor oil and you have to get it all up. basically you have to get something down to absorb the goop--i've heard things like sawdust recommended, and i'm pondering trying something wacky like cat litter. then you have to do a thorough cleaning of the floor to get rid of the rest of the goop, and i'm told this is easier said than done and may involve several passes and possibly even different cleaning chemicals. but it's all worth it. especially when i get to tell people my studio has a vegan floor.
in other floor news, ardex was closed yesterday and today so i haven't yet been able to call them to see what to do about the hairline cracks in the studio floor we poured last week.
good news: this was by far the smoothest floor leveling i've done. there were a some blemishes, like some dimples and whatnot throughout the floor, but i was able to fill these in with a featheredging patch and get things pretty smooth.
bad news: as i was down on my hands and knees troweling the patch, i started noticing these little hairline cracks. as i moved around more i started noticing more. upon closer inspection, the entire floor has hairline cracks about every 6-12 inches. i'm going to call the company that makes the leveling mix that i used tomorrow and see if they know of any conditions that might cause this.
regardless of what they tell me, i'm really bummed, since i'm 99% certain whatever they tell me is going to start with "well, you'll need to rip up the stuff you already laid down and then..." given that i've already spent $500 pouring this stuff, i'm not exactly eager to sink that kind of money into doing it again.
with my streak of bad luck with floor levelers thusfar, even after finding the best brand possible and getting useful advice from everywhere, i'm feeling inclined to say fuck it, i don't care anymore if the floor isn't level, and just pummel everything with a hammer drill and rip it out.
this still leaves the second reason i had for leveling the floors, which was to encapsulate any mastic residue from the previous floor tile which might contain asbestos. i'm thinking i might just attack this with some sort of pressure washer, which is more or less what the asbestos contractor would do if i paid them about $2000.