2 June 2014

Rolled out of bed at 6:45 which meant, of course, that Sean pulled in right when he said he would… while I was still slurping coffee and calories.  We discovered that some interesting spray foam sculptures had arisen from Blueboard gaps where I had, obviously, been a little heavy handed on the trigger.  Sean and I laid out the three heating zones on the house lower level (and the no heat area under the Wine Cellar Nook and Cedar Closet), marking the wall positions on the blue foam insulation with orange spray paint.  Very colorful!  Kevin and Ben from Long Ridge got here at 8 and started putting together the forms and rebar for the Garage frost wall footers.  Chuck arrived at 9 and he, Sean, and I quickly designed the layout for the in-slab radiant floor heat, which uses ½″ PEX tubing.  [Warning, construction details! Ideally, each tubing run should be 9″ from adjacent runs or a wall and each loop of tubing should be no more than 250′ long.  Doing the math with a 1,640 square foot cellar, that would mean using about 2,050 feet of tubing in 8 loops.] I worked with Chuck on the actual installation, finding ways to get the job done with about 1,400 feet of tubing in 6 loops.  A short time after Sean left, Larry, Victor, and Scott came rolling in.  Larry  gave me the invoices for work performed to date and I wrote the first (of many!!!!) mega-thousand dollar checks in payment.  Urp! On a positive note, Larry gave me credit (at his regular labor rate) for the hours I contributed during the cellar concrete wall construction.  A Carrara mixer came at some point and, next thing I knew, the Long Ridge crew was gone and there was fresh concrete in the forms.  Guess Chuck and I were just having too much fun in the sweltering sun.  By 2 o’clock all the PEX tubing was in place, so Chuck left, leaving me to fabricate PVC sleeves for where the tubing will enter and exit the cellar floor slab and a rebar support bar and posts to hold those sleeves in place during the cellar floor concrete pour.  Hit the lake (which is up to 70°) as soon as that was done and the area cleaned up.