WARNING: I am not a contractor and I do not believe this type of construction will pass a building code inspection! This is purely an experiment.
I have been interested in this type of build for a long time, and finally the wooden QT at my parents house started to rot away and they gave me the go ahead to tear it out and start from scratch. I have searched quite a bit for this type of application and I wasn't able to find someone using Surface Bonding Cement WITH the Xypex Admix nor with the concentrate. I contacted Xypex and they directed me to my local sales rep at Coastal Supply here in Jacksonville. Yon was very helpful in this process and told me that his engineers didn't know for sure if the Xypex will work with SBC due to some of the additives used, but he thought it was worth a shot. The amount of Admix that will be used in the SBC coat is only going to worth about $20 so why not give it a try? Best case scenario it works great and everyone is happy. Worst case scenario it doesn't seal properly and a regular Stucco coat with Admix will be applied which he knows will work.
So onto some pictures...
Before...
Look at all that pollen on the Zakki Shower.... It has been crazy bad the last couple weeks. I guess all of the trees got psyched out by the warm weather and started dropping their yellow allergy powder. Funny thing is a cold front just moved through and we could be seeing very cold weather again. Crazy Florida weather!
Couple hours of Sawzall work...
I couldn't remember how big I poured the footer for the roof support and was not happy with the results. This made me reduce the size of the pond and made it a lot narrower than I hoped for...
Then I made the fun discovery that all of the sprinkler valves and lines ran right through the area and shortened the pond again...
Ran into quite a few large branches/roots from when the house was originally built. This was no fun to dig around.
For some reason I forgot to take pictures of the form and concrete pour. I guess I was in too much of a hurry trying to get it all done in time so I didn't get charged extra for being late with the concrete mixer. I used a 1 1/4 yard mixer from our rental place and added 12 lbs of the Xypex Admix C-1000. I laid the first course with bond beam block with vertical rebar in ever other cell tying into the slab, and then horizontal rebar for added strength. The second course brings me up to the ground level. These bottom two courses will be poured solid with concrete because I will not be able to apply surface bonding cement to the outside of these two courses. You can see the three 2" return lines in this picture...
I custom made my bottom drains out of a standard 3" DWV 90 and I welded on 3/4" couplers in the bottom so I can attach 7" rubber diffusers as my drain covers. The exposed pipe is just to keep the concrete out of the pipe.
All ready for concrete...
More updates as they become available!
Zac