The basement in the Executive Mansion will be home to the new state of the art kitchen, laundry, administrative offices, and security/ surveillance systems. The original basement was on three levels. With the pour, these have now become one. Mike Westcott, Project Manager, accompanies Ryley on a tour of the finished floor, and they take a closer look at the framing progress.
The concrete slab floor is complete, and with the tight construction schedule, framing crews were on the floor the next day. About 64 yards of concrete was poured for the floor. During the setup process while the floor was still "green", control joints were put into all the openings to prevent and/or minimize cracking. These joints were cut with a diamond blade.
To capture a sheen on the 4 inch thick slab concrete floor, Mike Wescott's crew used a troweling machine and then applied a curing compound to keep the powder and chalkiness down and prevent it from working its way up through the slab.
While the basement floor was originally on three levels, the new slab is now all one level which is lower in many places than the orginal. This new lower level provides headroom for the updated mechanical, electrical, and sprinkler systems. However, in the case of an existing staircase, the crew will now have to extend the balastrade and add a few risers in order for the staircase to meet the new lower floor.
The restoration presents a few unique challenges to the framing crew as well. To accommodate the different elevations of the floor joists, the top members or plates of the interior partitions need to be doubled up to make the walls flush with the bottom of the joists. This makes for a fairly time consuming framing process as each stud must be cut individually and put into place rather than framing the partitions on the floor and then standing them up and as is typically done in most new construction today.
The old exterior walls aren't quite square either. Ryley points out a new stud that he checks for plumb. It is snug up against the exterior wall at the bottom but there is a significant gap at the top. Originally the exterior walls had a plaster finish, which was more forgiving than the new drywall will be. To compensate for the irregularity of the old exterior walls now that drywall is will be attached, Mike's crew will fur them out using a furring system to ensure that all the walls are plumb before screwing in the 5/8 inch drywall. Again, all the members will need to be individually constructed in place to make sure that the walls are level.
Mike also pointed out to Ryley where is the basement slab is recessed. This will accommodate the pavers in the entrance to the new addition which will house the elevator making the mansion handicapped accessible. The addition was necessary as there was not enough room in the existing mansion for the elevator. However, architecturally the new addition will restore bilateral symmetry to the mansion when viewed from the back, balancing out a previous addition from the early 1950's.
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