Breaking News

The latest news at Maple Leaf Gardens is that we worked on the kitchen tonight. We poured cement to fill in the voids left after we cut out the old cement pad.

Earlier this week, Troy had finished putting in all the floor joists and foam insulation (on top of the new pad we poured).

For work tonight we threw some plywood down so we could walk around, dragged in the cement mixer and got to it.

Here you can see the gap we were filling:

The red at the top of the picture is the old slab (it still runs around the outside of the room). The bottom part of the picture is the plywood over the floor joists (so where the underfloor will be laid). In this part of the room there was roughly a 1" gap between the two. Most of the room was pretty close to that except the north wall which had a lot more of the floor crumble away.

To keep the concrete from getting all over everywhere we rigged up a shield which worked pretty well.

Troy would mix the concrete,

and pour it into the tub pictured at the top. Then we would dump it into/on the crack and I would work it in:

It all was fairly slick. Troy estimated we could finish by 11:00. I took that to mean 2:00 a.m. when plans hit the real world. Actually we were done by 10:00! Hooray. I think part of why we finished so quickly is that there were jobs we both could do and we didn't have a lot of time wasted because only one person [Troy] could do any of the work that needed to be done.

Our estimates jumped between needing three and four batches for the job. After mixing and spreading three loads, we finished with two half batches since 3.5 just wasn't enough! (That added a little time, but I took a little nap right there while Troy mixed the last half batch so not all was wasted. I have been soo tired this week.)

This is the area that took so much concrete:

The gap was much wider than elsewhere in the room and actually quicker to fill because of it. But it took a lot more concrete. It also had to actually be filled right up to the level of the old slab because Troy is going to need to lay the baseplate for the wall on top of it.

When we were finished, all the empty area under the old slab and between it and the new floor was filled.

The base is done; from here, everything is built up. And first up are the new interior walls...