Basement Floor

The basement floor was poured via the concrete truck chute coming down through a window and moving the concrete with wheelbarrows. We had never had to wheelbarrow concrete and we were apprehensive of how much work this was going to be. We got a number of guys out to help and we were finished pouring by about 11:30 am. The day was quite cold and it took untill about 4:00 before we tried trawling. Even then the concrete barely wanted to set. We would trawl once over, wait an hour and return to trawl some more. I trawled untill about 6 am, going over the floor and taking a nap on about a 30 minute cycle. The top stayed sloppy untill almost the very last pass. I had to be very sure my footsteps were trawled out near the end because if not, on the next pass the surface would be too hard and it was hard to gauge when that would be. There are still some footprints in the floor.

The floor has 2" of styrofoam underneath it for insulation. Now in winter, the basement, which isn't intentionally heated, keeps the floor warm enough that one can walk on it withough shoes and not get cold feet. The styrofoam does a good job of ninimizing heat seepage down through the floor.

It would have been nice if the concrete had some calcium in it to firm it up better. Instead of firming up properly, the top inch always seemed to stay soupy and we were not used to that. The weather was quite cold that day, about 5C., or so we were cold.