| Our beautiful Dac-Art concrete steps are
now in and grouted. It is interesting how they were attached. Small
holes were drilled thru the top of the steps into the holes where the
short pieces of rebar are epoxied. The epoxy is squirted into the hole
after the steps and in their exact spot. Jose and Juan have gotten them
all grouted now. |
The narrow steps leading down to the north.
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The steps to the South are wider than the
ones on the north. There has been a lot of cutting and grinding to get
these precast concrete steps to align perfectly. The tolerance in the
Building Inspector's book is very narrow. Only 1/4 in. difference can
exist in the rise height of any of the steps. |
The epoxy squirt gun has a long mixing
nozzle on it, very clever. |
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| The CMU blocks that the steps
sit on have pieces of rebar inserted into holes drilled into them. The next
step down also has a hole drilled into it to slide onto the exposed
rebar. Additionally there is a tiny hole drilled in the step into which
the epoxy gun is placed and epoxy is squirted into the hole to secure
the rebar and the step. Our seams are then grouted. The guys sued some
caulk in the more open seams before they grouted, lets hope they got
enuf grout in there to really stay put. |
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| We are suppose to get some
beautiful column caps from Dac-Art, but in the meantime, we have
attached some sloped pieces of Dac-Art that were delivered to us by
mistake I think :o) We needed something to stop the rain from entering
the open ends of the columns and possibly traveling down into the grout
lines of our blocks. If we get our final column caps, we set these
pieces of concrete in a way that leaves us plenty of room to slide a reciprocating
saw up into the grout and cut the temp. cap off. They could be used
again and we could then attach our mobetta and fancier column caps.
Meanwhile they look fine and low-key. |
| Getting Ripped Off: |
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| Well what you see above is the
cut line or our A/C Freon lines. Some sonuvabitch cut our copper lines
right after they were installed and stole then. They also cut and stole
some rolled up romax wire up in the main bedroom where it was awaiting
it's installation into the bedroom after the roof was on. It is really
sickening that someone would do this to us. They broke the plastic
copper line holders in the basement and seemed to have just taken the
easy to grab stuff. It is usually an inside job when this happens. So
now we have a higher level of security and a gun in the
guesthouse. |
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Here is a tip: do not let anyone use plastic
mounting holders, this fellow would have had a much harder time removing
this pipe if the mounts had been METAL and screwed in well. It might
have aroused some attention if he was yanking against metal mounts.
Metal straps are a lot less expensive than getting ripped off. |
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Back to the waterproofing issues.
We think that the biggest problem is in
the grout lines. Try as I might to get the workers to be precise in
their measurements and to use only certain products, over and over I
found that they mixed grout that did not look at all like what had been
used the day before, etc.. I will add some close-ups of grout lines to
show you what I mean. We went round-and-round discussing grout formulas
in the early days and I thought we had it all figured out. But it is
very obvious that what we got was not always what it should have been.
And the worst part is that many places in the wall seem to have grout
that lets water in easily. The only solutions is to use one of the
high-tech sealers on the walls. It is not like it is a really hard thing
to do, it is just extra expense and more work. I figure that it is gonna
cost me at least an extra thousand dollars to do the sealant. This is no
where near what it would cost to have the 'Pros" come do it and
from what I hear, the results might not be as good. |
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Look how very different
these bone-dry grout lines look. Pretty clear that different mixes were
used. And see the little white dots in the grout....I told them over and
over not to use ANY grout mix that had been exposed to moisture enuf to
form little hard deposits in the bag, but the Mexicans just did not seem
to be able to understand what the big deal was. The other workers didnt
seem to think it was important either. I only knew from past experience
that if the grout mix had been exposed to humid air, then the BB size
clumps formed and even if you pulverized them or removed them and mixed
your grout, no matter how normal it looked, later on, you had problems.
The big thing down here is that no one stocks the best grout mix, they
know that they can't keep it for long at all before it is absorbing air
moisture. The stuff weighs a ton and distributors further inland don't
want to fool with shipping it a bag or two at a time, but that is best.
And keeping it in a climate controlled place after delivery is
imperative. I think Thoro DriJoint in white is best. Very hard to
locate. And when you get it from out of town, you may open it and see
clumps...if you REALLY want the best joints, drive to B'ham or whereever
YOURSELF, put a bag or two in your back-seat (open one there to be sure
it is not at all clumping) and bring it to the humid coast and store it
in air conditioning. And do that for all your bags of grout mix. |
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These three photos were taken a couple weeks
ago the day after we got 8.5 inches of rain in one long rainy day. The
top two show the interior wall pretty much in the center of the house,
where the stairs go from first floor to second. (We still have temp
stairs). You can see that most of the water looks to have come thru the
grout lines. But also, on the outside of the house, it looks pretty
obvious that some Dac-Art blocks are more absorbent than others. We
don't want that gloomy Count of Monte Christo cell look for days after a
rain, so sealing then is our only choice. And we sure don't want any
moisture issues inside.
We are suppose to get a rain on Friday of
this week, so we will be able to see the effects of our Miracle 511
spray sealing, and where we missed, etc. |
I sprayed from the ground as high as I could
reach without a ladder and went all the way around the house. We have
the man-lift for about one more week, so we have to be sure we get all
our spraying done while we have it. |
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| Here Dave is spraying the
porch area on the first floor. It would really not be necessary to seal
teh columns, but it would look better, for consistency sake, when it
rains. |
| We had Jose come out on the weekend to
power wash the blocks, to remove loose sand and powdered dust from all
the sawing of concrete that we did, but he kept getting the wand too
close to the wall and it was removing the exterior color on the blocks.
It was scaring me. I could see engraved wavy lines where he had passed
the wand. We sent him on home and decided that since we had power washed
the lower 4 or 5 rows of blocks ourselves, that was enuf. Backsplash
tends to deposit grime on the lower surfaces anyway. We had already had
a good, strong rain against the upper blocks, so that is good enuf for
us. Didn't want to risk marring the face of the blocks. |
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