In filled and just about ready for a concrete slab

We finished getting the stem walls infilled with cinder. This ended up being a project in itself, which included 27 truck loads of cinder, 1300 gallons of water and an engineer certifying the type of soil and doing compaction tests as it is being backfilled.

At the time it seemed like a lot of work to get everything infilled and ready for a slab, but having poor fill and poor compaction is not all that good of an alternative. Compaction tests turned out great, and the comments of the plumber who had to trench in waste lines verified that we had good compaction!!

This past week was time for the plumbers to get waste lines and water lines put in prior to putting down vapor barrier and 2" blue board. The plumbers finished up on Tuesday and passed inspection the same day.

That same day I had a discussion with the plumber and the person doing the finished slab work for us at the building site. The topic was radiant heating.

I had brought up that I would be putting 2" blue board around the perimeter of the house along the edge where the block goes from a 8" width to a 6" width. This was to prevent the slab from radiating heat out to the stem walls. They looked at me as though I was crazy. I was not only informed that that was not the way it was done up here but that I would probably have a tough time convincing the county as well of the technique I was planning on using.

To make a long story short, after several phone calls and a trip to the county building department to discuss the way I was intending to do our radiant floor heating the county only asked for a detail drawing and said they were fine with the whole technique.

Friday was pre-treatment day for termites. This also needed to be completed prior to the vapor barrier and the 2" blueboard being put down.

Early Saturday morning found me digging the fireplace footing prior to laying down the vapor barrier. I wanted to complete this myself so as not to have to have the concrete slab crew trampling all over the blue board

After that was completed we put down the 6mil vapor barrier. We were fortunate that we had light winds for doing this as well as putting down the blue board. A windy day would have made this job a whole lot less enjoyable.

After we had the vapor barrier down we started to put down the blue board. This really was not all that hard of a job, but it sure turned out to be very time consuming. We did end up finishing by dark but it made for a very long day!!

Early Sunday morning I put the manifold for the radiant floor in place. After the rebar has been put down tomorrow, we plan on spending Tuesday hooking up the 7/8 Pex tubing to the manifold, and then stringing out 5 - 300' runs and tying it down to the rebar with zip ties.