Prepping the Back Basement

November 1, 2014

Over the course of the past few days, I’ve been slowly stockpiling bags of concrete. I can get about 6 bags in my car, so I’ve made about 3 separate trips to Home Depot since Thursday. Bob also brought 6 more bags with him today, when he showed up. All told, we have about 37 bags (the number he estimtes we need, to fill in the back basement area).

We used a chalk line to mark where we needed to cut the concrete. When pouring in new concrete, we wanted to have a clean line. Bob had a grinder with him, but not the right blade. So we headed over to the nearby Ace Hardware for the blade. After we got back, I started to cut… and not 5 minutes go by before the grinder starts smoking and up and dies on us.

So we hop back into the car, and hit up Home Depot for new grinders.

While we were there, I happened to spot a guy by a MakerBot 3D printer. We stopped and asked him a ton of questions, and got to see the thing in action. It’s a really cool device, and with Bob’s knowledge of AutoCAD… I think this machine would be right up his alley.

Back at the house. Bob had to leave to get back to Frankfort, so I ended up tackling the concrete cutting solo. I got a very serious warning about being careful with the blade, as Bob showed me a photo of a cut he suffered on his finger (he had gloves on that were twice as thick as mine). I made sure to be very, very careful while I was working.

First pass, I scored where the chalk was. Then, going back, I poured water as I worked the cut deeper (to help minimize the dust). Eventually, I got a pretty deep cut consistently down the floor.

The next step was to take the demo hammer and hit the concrete loose. What it should technically do is break along the seam I cut. But the first swing I took was overly hard – and resulted in the concrete fracturing past the cut. For the most part, it was a clean line – except for this patch in the middle. Dang it!

Unfortunately, this is the one spot where things didn’t work out. I think I just hit it too hard, as I lessened the force after this area – and everywhere else, the concrete broke just fine.

Despite me trying to be careful, I did end up cutting my thumb a bit. Amazingly, I didn’t injure myself with the grinder blade – but instead, nicked my thumb when tugging at the loosened concrete.

It was a really small cut, and so I kept on working (the glove makes it look worse than it actually was). I still think it’s funny that the blade didn’t get me, but instead I was essentially injured by a rock.

Technically, the back basement area is prepped. If all goes well tomorrow, we’ll be pouring in a ton of concrete, and filling out the area. One step closer to having a washer and dryer!