Fun With Concrete

This week we had some family in town, but we still managed to get a little work done on the house.  One week from today our brand new washer and dryer are going to be delivered, so one of our top priorities is to create a level surface for them to sit on.  The area where we plan to put the dryer was the lowest point in the basement and was the location of a very old, sunken drain.  When we had the sewer replaced last week we had them move the drain a few feet out, but the area was still much lower than the rest of the basement floor (including the location of the new drain).

We plan to level the whole area using self-leveling concrete but the guys who replaced our sewer left behind an eighty pound bag of concrete and we decided to put it to good use.  The area where the drain was so much lower than the rest of the floor that we decided that we could fill the lowest point with the free concrete and save ourselves some money by minimizing how much self-leveling concrete we have to buy.  We started out by pouring a lot of water on the floor to see where it collected.  Doing this gave us a very good idea of how the floor slopes and where the lowest point was.  Based on where the water collected, we marked off the area that we were going to fill.  This also gave us the opportunity to test our brand new drain, which worked wonderfully for getting all that water out of there.

Laying the concrete was actually pretty simple, and it turned out pretty well considering it was our first time.  We'll post a complete how-to once the project is complete.

Now that the lowest part of the floor is about two inches higher we'll lay self-leveling concrete to level off the whole area.  This will give us a nice flat surface to build a platform for the new washer and dryer on and, we hope, save us some headache in the future when we finish the basement.  Check back next week for the complete finished project!