Basement stories

The best renovation news since the dining room: we finally have a floor at the basement! At the beginning of the week we prepared the basement for the concrete casting. The plumbers installed first the floor heating pipes and then we placed the iron bars to the floor. The concrete professionals filled the floors with 8 centimeters thick layer. After the rooms were filled they felt low. Maybe because we were since May without a floor and used to the higher ceiling. Anyhow there is still enough room height. Now the basement starts to look more like an area, where we can live and work. It's not anymore only a construction area. The plumbers placed all over the floor the heating pipes. Now it will be cosy for feet at the winter time. The professionals did the installation pretty fast. Tobi and Christoph cut the iron nets in the right size and placed them to the rooms. Concrete alone is strong with pressure, but weak in tension. The job of the iron is to make the floor handle more tension in other words to make it stronger. The blue round things will be the floor drains. Because the floors were covered with several iron net pieces, they needed to be tied together so they would be stable for the concrete casting. Susanna tied them together with steel wire. The tying technique was fun to learn and Susanna did a pretty good job.
Two big trucks brought 7 cubic meters concrete to our yard. The concrete came out from a big and long pipe, which was lifted over our fence with a high lifter. Tobi and Christoph were helping with moving the pipe from another room to another. This was the first time for us, when we saw how the concrete floor is done. It took about 4 hours to make the floor for over 70 square meters. We were quite impressed about the speed and the quality of the work. You could tell, that they knew what they were doing. The day was rainy and dark and one moment the electricity was even gone, but that didn't cause any problems. Now we can walk on the floor and start with the walls. The floor is completely dry in 8 weeks, one centimeter per week. So the earliest point for showering is at the end of October after the tiling. Altough we still have a lot head of us, we feel like we've achieved something. We are motivated to make the rooms ready!