Concrete Slabs..For Real This Time

Our concrete slabs were scheduled to be poured on April 2nd. The date they were actually poured? April 27th. Welcome to the world of construction scheduling. 

They were delayed so long because apparently it never stops raining in Northern Canada. Who knew? Our yard was so muddy that we kept postponing the pour because we were afraid that the concrete trucks wouldn't be able to make it in or out of our yard. We were so frustrated with just sitting around for almost a whole month without any progress and the long range forecast was rain, rain, and more rain so we decided to just deal with the mud and go ahead with the pour. We poured on the Friday, and the new updated weather forecast as of the Saturday? Warm and sunny. Yup. Mother Nature hates us. If we would have waited until Monday, the mud wouldn't have been that big of a deal. Murphy's Law, right? 

Well, either way, we now have concrete slabs! 

Deconstruction Construction?

Our Family Room is a walk out. I love how this gives us great views of the nature that surrounds our house and it will be easy peasy to let the dog out once we actually move in. This is going to be our main living space so we didn't want to use carpet as our flooring. I hate carpet, especially with having a dog around that likes to shed. All the grime, dirt and who knows what get down in your carpet and you can never NEVER get it out. So gross. We wanted to install the same laminate flooring in that space as the rest of the house instead. This caused a little bit of a dilemma. The living room is a walk out, so it lends itself nicely to a slab on grade type of construction. This is very similar to how a basement is constructed. Slab on grade is pretty much what it sounds like, a slab of concrete poured onto the ground. Construction terms are so technical sometimes. Anyways, laminate shouldn't be installed directly onto concrete. Concrete absorbs moisture which can then be absorbed into the laminate flooring causing swelling, warping, and other damage. So we decided that we should look for alternatives to a concrete floor. 

We (The Husband) did some research and discovered that there is a new-ish type of floor construction called a sleeper (or floating) floor. I don't want to get too technical and detailed about it so I am just going to say that it is similar to a concrete slab on grade just without the concrete. You use a styrofoam panel that has steel studs imbedded in it and then you put a plywood subfloor on top that goes on top of you foundation wall but underneath the exterior walls to tie the floor system into the wall system of the house. This did not work for us at all. We had the floor installed for maybe 5 months and the ground settled and there was a lot of flex and bounce in the floor. This wasn't good either, as the laminate wouldn't be able to withstand that abound of flex in the subfloor. 

Now what do we do?

Cry. And then cry a bit more. I am not going to lie I am pretty sure some tears were shed that day. 

Then we called our concrete guy. 

He came and took a look. We didn't know of any way to fix our mistake ( I don't even think that mistake it the right word here. Epic fail, maybe?) and neither did our concrete guy. So what did we do? We had no choice but to rip out the floor out and start over again, with a concrete floor. 

To be able to lay our laminate flooring on top of the concrete we are going to use a fancy shmancy type of subfloor. It is a 24 x 24 plywood square that has rubber on the bottom that raises the plywood off of the concrete allowing any moisture that absorbs into the concrete to dry instead of being absorbed into the floor. You can then install your finished flooring on top of the subfloor. 

The first step to replacing the floor in the Family Room was to remove the sleeper floor system. We started by ripping out the plywood subfloor. We had to cut out around the whole perimeter of the room and then we had to unscrew all of the subfloor screws and then remove the actual subfloor. We had to take out the styrofoam panels and then remove the poly under the styrofoam. We then had to rake and dig out 2" of sand and gravel from the whole family Room (a 22' x 22' room). That's a lot of sand. Then we started over again. We had re-level and re-tamp the ground, re-lay the poly, re-lay the styrofoam and then lay and tie the rebar. 

You can see where we cut out the subfloor here and how much the ground settled.
The part that The Husband is stepping on should be flush with the plywood on the outside,
not 2" lower.

We have started to take out the subfloor and you can see the styrofoam below.

Almost all of the subfloor is gone.

The ground is re-leveled and re-tamped and ready for the
concrete slab prep 

Here the poly is laid and most of the styrofoam
is down.

The rebar is installed and we are ready to pour concrete! 

Sneak Peek!

We are pouring our concrete slabs today. Here is a sneak peak at how things are going:

Look! A tub!

Yup, we have a tub.

Inspiration Board - Sitting Room

Just off of our Dining Room and Kitchen is our Sitting Room. They are all basically one large open space running from the front of the main floor to the back. The Dining Room and Kitchen have the dark/light theme that we seem to having going on throughout the house in them so I wanted to add a bit of color to the Sitting Room. Nothing too crazy as we want it to be a relaxing space. Right now I am thinking of doing a light blue/aqua color (similar to what I am thinking for the Laundry Room).

Inspiration Board

1. We want to do a white or cream leather sofa in this space. The one pictured isn't the one we are thinking of going with right now, but it's similar. 

2. Aqua coloured blinds. I haven't seen any patterned curtains in this color scheme that I like so I am thinking that we will stick with a solid in this room. 

3. We already own these Lack coffee tables for Ikea and I think they work with our Sitting Room.

4. There isn't room for two full sized armchairs so we have opted to go with two slipper chairs. I love the black and white graphic print for the chairs. The Husband not so much but I am working on convincing him he's wrong. Paired with a more geometric print cushion (this particular one is a current love from Etsy) and it couldn't be more perfect. 

5. This one should look familiar by now, the same flooring that is going pretty much throughout the whole house with a white area rug. 

Thanks for stopping by!

More Weather Delays

Okay so I am a bad blogger.

Well, that and there hasn't been too much going on on the house building front. We had everything booked to have our concrete slabs poured on April 2 but our yard looked like this:

Yep, we had a lake. There is no way we were going to get a concrete truck in there. We spent days pumping the water out of the driveway but even after the water was mostly pumped out the yard was just  gross. Wet mucky mud everywhere. Not much of an improvement over the lake puddle but at least we thought it would dry faster. Seeing as how there wasn't going to be any work happening over the next few days we decided to make the 13hr trek to my family's for Easter. Plus we thought we'd come back to a much dryer yard.  

And we did. We came back on the 11th and the yard was quite a bit dryer. So we booked the concrete pour for the next Wednesday. Then we woke up to this:

Your eyes are not deceiving you, that is snow. In April. Yuck. 

The snow still hasn't melted but I am thinking that as far as the yard being dry enough to get a concrete truck in here we are back at square one. We'll probably have more water to pump out and then it will take at least a week or so to dry out enough to get the truck in here. So we just lost about 2 weeks. grrr.