It has been something of a slow week at our Concrete Casa while we waited for the main level floor to cure before being polished. We arrived at the site yesterday and met briefly with the HVAC guy to strategize on the location of returns, etc. and checked out the floor in the master bedroom.
It is incredibly flat and has no visible defects after curing for just under two weeks. The floor over the basement is much thinner (2″ vs. 5″) so is a little more prone to cracking - there are two that have appeared so far. That is very much par for the course, they will just be filled with epoxy before polishing. If all goes according to plan Micah and his crew will be there early next week.
I also checked out my concrete stair treads - Doug popped them out of the forms and they looked a lot better than I anticipated. As I thought, the corners are a little rough and the shape isn’t quite perfect given the hastily constructed forms. I don’t think they will make the cut for the stairs, but would be great to make a walkway outside somewhere. I’m planning to build some new forms as I mentioned, I just need to get some materials and carve off a little time. I’ve also been reading up on another technique called GFRC - Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete - that allows for the construction of much thinner panels for concrete countertops, etc., without the need for steel reinforcement.
We are going to work on some admin tasks this weekend and perhaps start building some forms for the driveway so the next time Citywide calls with some scrap concrete we will be able to put it to use. I spent some time last week looking into cabinets (Ikea entered the race) so we will probably mask off areas on the floor for the cabinets and kitchen island to get a sense of the flow through that area.
The only other news is I think we killed the idea of using stone on the exterior of the house. The panels and the silver roof lean much more to the modern while the faux stone is a lot more traditional. We are going to replace the stone around the entryway with cedal planks, similar to the look you see here courtesy of ‘hotfunk.’