It seemed like a never ending task, but this weekend we finished removing all the foam board “forms” from the interior of the shell.  Now all of the interior concrete wall/ceiling is exposed. You may recall from earlier posts how we used two layers of 1 inch polystyrene foam board  to act as the form for our shell.  The shotcrete was sprayed from the outside.  After the concrete set, we needed to remove the the foam from the inside.  The first layer came off easily and we had lots of friends come by and help with that.  The layer up against the concrete should have come off easily because we had applied a “release agent” to it.  Unfortunately, we had had several rainstorms between the time we put the forms up and the shotcrete was applied and it all washed off.  Since November, we have been slowly picking away at it, mostly with small trowels and scrapers.  And when I say We, I mean mostly Jeff.  He has made it his mission in the past months to get all the foam off working tirelessly  weekends and on his days off.  It has been one of the most difficult processes in building this house and we are glad that it’s over.

We have now started to set up the faswall blocks on the West end of our house.  The scrap foam pieces will get ground up to add to our “lightweight” concrete mix for filling the block cavities.