studio building - a smooth studio floor

Just yesterday, our studio floor got a whole lot more hospitable to actual pottery making.  It wasn't very long ago, though, that the first floor of our studio looked like this:

Yikes.  These days, it's easy to forget how much ledge we worked around to get this building out of the ground!  A couple of weeks ago, it was looking like this inside:

And then Nathan and the guys got busy with the sub-floor foam insulation and tubing for our eventual radiant heat, and things started to look like this:

With the tubing installed atop four inches of insulation, we lined up the crew to manage the pour, and waited for the timing to be right.  As it turns out, by the time we were ready, our road had been "posted" - prohibiting trucks over a certain weight limit- most definitely including concrete trucks- for travel.  (During mud season, as we call it in New England, the messy thaw between winter and spring can make the unpaved roads downright impassable, with ruts so deep, you could lose a small car in them.) Gulp.

Fortunately, we were able to work with our town (thank you, Bethel, VT!) to get a temporary waiver for a very cold morning when the ground- and our yard, for that matter- would be frozen enough to handle two 80,000 pound concrete trucks.  We were good to go.

The crew was here by 7 am, and the two trucks got across the yard without a hitch, thanks to a nine-degree night.  The heavy loads were emptied and the trucks were gone before even the slightest thaw began that day.

The crew was great.  It didn't take long for the initial leveling and scree work to be done.  I set the anchor bolts for the sill plates around the door in the front, and the waiting began.  The crew spent the entire day smoothing and polishing the surface in several intervals as the concrete set.  They didn't pull out of here until 8pm, with a light snow falling all around.

The building stayed warm enough over night, and by morning, we had a hard surface showing good signs of drying and curing.  We'll score the floor tomorrow (to prevent cracking), and start work in the building again on Tuesday.  Having this piece finished is HUGE - now we can proceed with the lower door, and connect the two levels with stairs.  Needless to say, I am very excited about this . . .

~Becca