Another update on the house project.
Yesterday and today my brother-in-law and his contractor son-in-law, both up in Wyoming, came down to help me out. I pay them to come help and it helps them too. My brother-in-law was a hospital lab manager for a long time but they overworked him and he burned out. He quit and has been working on starting a business and so any extra side jobs help. My nephew-in-law also appreciate as much work as he can though he keeps pretty busy.
Anyway, I had some work meetings yesterday morning and my boss called me in the afternoon with a customer escalation with bad bug found by an important customer so I had to go home, attend a Zoom, and figure stuff out, but otherwise I and my brother- and nephew-in-law worked most of the day and my son came up for a few hours after his college online class and some assignments, before he had to get ready for his UPS evening shift. Nephew-in-law had to leave around 5:30pm yesterday as his wife and kids came down as well and she needed to go to some store before it closed or something but my brother-in-law worked with me until 8pm. We basically laid out a vapor barrier and foam insulation for under the basement slab yesterday. We almost finished. Just had a small amount of foam left. Everywhere there is radiant heating and cooling in the basement we laid out this greenish foam called "Hyrdofoam" which is made to take PEX tubing pushed down into it. To "thermally isolate" the rest of the basement slab so it doesn't draw heat out and into the ground we just used 2" EPS foam insulation sheets from Home Depot -- shiny side up.
Today we laid all the PEX down. You just snap it in between the numbs. Some corners you want to put a plastic foam staple in to make sure it doesn't pop up but they could lay 250 ft runs in about 10 minutes once I had gone with our builder's crayon on a stick and laid out the path for them to follow (more or less following the engineering plans for the radiant).
Our structural engineer had laid out the slab so that it was thicker, no foam, along the outer walls, so our PEX layout differed a little from the engineer's drawing of the PEX layout since he measured from the wall and we have a 3-5" gap before the foam started.
We also didn't lay the foam over the footings so that the slab concrete will be about 7" thick right over the footing, with a little extra rebar in it at foam level so that the bearing walls are only resting on concrete with no foam sandwiched in between (also not taken into account by the radiant heat engineer). But we made it work. We have't pressure tested the piping yet as we only had an hour before it was dark to set it up and figure it out. I'll do that beginning of the coming week.
We also had 4000 sq ft of "6x6 R2.1 remesh" -- the wire grid panels you see in the pic below (all rusty of course). We had to get them into the house basement, which was not easy. At first we had on guy up on the ground, one guy on the porch wall, one guy up on the inner wall, and me down in the basement. They would pass this 20' x 8' wire mesh from person to person and then down to me where it would inevitably fall once it was completely over the wall and it would bonk me in the head (after a couple smacks on the head from it falling on me I went and got my hard hat out of the car). It was taking forever. Then we got the bright idea to make a bridge from the ground to the porch to the back wall. We took 6 12' and 6 16' scaffolding planks. We laid two sets of 3 each of the 16' from the ground out to the porch, and then the 12' from the porch to the rear wall. I screwed a 2x4 into each set of 3 on one end so they would stay in place relative to each other, and at the porch end we screwed the 12' into the 16', and at the far end the 12' each went between the vertical rebar sticking up so they wouldn't slide out. Then my son and nephew-in-law could just go drag a steel mesh sheet up to the wall and lower it down to me and my brother-in-law. Was about 10x faster than the way we had been doing it. Pics below of our bridge system and the stack of mesh after we had moved it all.
We got a lot of mesh moved into place in the garages, vault room, and cold storage under the porch and started to move a small amount into the main room over the PEX (we want to do the pressure test before we move too much over the PEX). I also need to fionish the rebar over the footings. The mesh and bar will be raised up right before the pour so that it is in the middle of the slab.
Lots done the last two days. We were all working until almost 8pm and dark time and we started around 8:20am (at least my BIL and Nephew-IL did -- I was closer to 9am and my son came a little later as he gets home late from UPS and so doesn't get up so early).
We need to pressure test and finish laying out mesh and bar so we can be ready for the slab pour this coming Friday (knock on wood).
One aggravating thing about this was that we had 2 boxes of PEX sent to us and the vendor shipped Fedex Ground. It was shipped 09/02 from NY and arrived in Utah and one of the two boxes was delivered 09/08. For some reason the other box of the combined shipment was sent to KY and then back. It went out for delivery yesterday (to the new house address, where they already delivered one box the week before). But for some reason the driver reported the address was wrong and didn't deliver. As soon as I got the notification I was on the phone to Fedex and after fighting their interactive voice response system, I had to wait for 15-20 minutes on hold, as I walked around Lowe's trying to buy more vapor barrier. I talked to their customer service and explained the address was correct, that they had already delivered one of the two boxes there the week before, that they were a week late, and that we needed the box delivered asap, and that I had a team there waiting for it to install it. The guy opened a case and promised me it would be delivered today by 12 noon. I spelled out "special delivery instructions" that they appended to the shipment, spelling out it was a house under construction, the only one on the street, and the house number was in order for the houses on both sides. (I had explained that to the company shipping it as well but I don't know if they attached it as instructions on the original shipment, but the first box was delivered ok).
Today at noon it still was not delivered. It just said "Out for delivery by end of day" on the tracking. I called Fedex ad talked again, and explained again that we had a team waiting and needed it asap to finish it today (and indeed we had already laid the first box worth of PEX lines). I asked the lady to send a note to the station so that they could call the driver and tell him to get to our house asap and that Fedex had promised me the day before it would be there by noon. It finally did show up a little after 3pm and my nephew-in-law was up close to the street and saw the guy stop. The driver was looking all over the power pedestal and the Honey Bucket porta-potty for the house number and he looked confused. My nephew-in-law told the guy it was the right place and just to leave it but he was still confused. I came up and told him it was right and thanked him and he left it on the sidewalk and left. I went and look at the box and the local station had printed out a satellite or aerial photo of the neighborhood that had our lot on it and marked with the street address, and the local Fedex station had highlighted the house in Yellow, so it was obvious to the driver it was the right house, but he was still confused. Luckily we were there and not out to lunch... (The aerial view photo was kind of cool as it was pretty recent as you could easily see the house under construction in it with the outline of the foam foundation etc.)
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Looks like a new vehicle to me!
