We just poured our ICF basement, and we will be using Delta-MS for waterproofing on the areas below ground level. Since our basement is a daylight basement, the ground slopes on the sides until the grade level is to the slab level on the back.
This exposed area of the ICF will get covered with cement siding.
My question is do you run the siding all the way to the ground level? If not, what do you use between the grade level and the siding?

Thanks,

Boontucky

Any base coat for EIFS with a fibermesh layed in is acceptable. Talk to your ICF supplier, this is normally something they carry for this situation.

It's called a parge coat. I generally do 2 coats, finish the second coat with a 6" wallpaper paste brush or a tile setters sponge to give it some texture

Here's what I did. Sorry I don't have any pictures of what it looks like after the siding was installed. I can get some tomorrow.

I took DOW blue board and cut it to a strip wide enough to go from the bottom of the siding to the top of the dimple membrane. The top of the strip is beveled at 45° and the bottom 3" is rabbeted 3/8" to overlap the membrane. I fastened it to the ICF with 2" button top nails. I covered it with Tuff-II from Styro Industries. Application method I found that worked best for me was to trowel on the first coat and then use a paint brush to smooth it out. Spraying the first coat didn't work because the stucco wouldn't fill in the voids over the button nails or wherever the mesh pulled away from the blue board. I sprayed the top edge of the parging as you can see in the pic of the stepped side before I finally gave up spraying the first coat. After the first coat dried I then used a drywall hopper sprayer to spray the second coat which gave me the stippled surface.

On two sides of the house where the grade slopes you can see I stepped the blue board 8" to match the siding course height. I'll get a pic of the sloped side with the siding on. It came out looking quite nice. People are impressed by the look of the parging.

I started the stucco about an inch or two above the blue board. This gives a continuous water shed surface from the ICF to the ground. I didn't need flashing under the edge of the siding.

The Tuff-II is relatively easy to work with and you can trowel, brush, or spray it on, whatever works for you. It is pricey, which is why I stepped the parging. The fiber mesh and stucco material cost me about $600 for the entire ~300' perimeter of the house. Most of the parging area is about 9" high like you see in the pic of the kitchen & DR walls. You can order it from Lowes with no extra charge for shipping.

The sticky mesh adheres to the ICF foam pretty well, but only if you clean it off really good. I found a Scotch abrasive pad worked good. DOW styro board has a thin plastic on both sides. I had to remove it to get the sticky mesh to stick adequately.

Here's some pics of how the parging looks with the siding installed.

Nice look! I have used the parging coatings for some time now.

My only concern would be impact resistance from kids, wheelbarrows, lawnmowers, etc, for any product you use!

This answers my question on ICF Finishing, Thanks John

Thanks for all the info. Great pictures, Dmaceld. But I have a question, why do you add the blueboard? Couldn't I do the same thing right onto the ICF foam?

Thanks.

That's exactly what I was planning on doing but the dimple membrane foiled my plan. The weather was cool when we applied the dimple and when the sun shone on it for a while in warmer weather the plastic expanded something awful. It buckled between almost every pair of screws and washers. This occurred with both the Platon flat edge as well as the DMX edging we used on the DMX dimple. We had a mix of both brands. I don't have a good close up showing the problem but you can get a pretty good idea from the pic below.

The stucco material will not hang onto and fill in the fiber mesh if there is a void behind it so overlapping the mesh over the top edge of the dimple would have left voids wherever the dimple was not tight against the foam. So in order to get a good clean stucco surface that would shed water over the top edge of the dimple I used the 3/4" thick blue board strips. There is about a 3/8" deep by 3" high rabbet on the back side of the blue board. That allows the blue board to overlap the dimple about 3". The blue board enabled me to have a clean smooth stucco surface that would shed water from the ICF foam surface, over and past the top edge of the dimple, and onto the ground side of the dimple.

This is one time where I was concerned with both form and function! Make sense now???

That makes perfect sense. We used Delta MS clear on ours and we sealed the top of the membrane with window flashing. We might end up needing to add the blue foam since our ground slopes and we had to cut the membrane at an angle and it doesn't have the nice flat strip at the top anymore.
Thanks!

Thanks for the all the details and pictures. That we very helpful. I do have a couple of questions though.

Our contractor did not use Delta MS below the grade on our Logix ICFs. I am not exactly sure what he used but it looked like some kind of heavy plastic or rubber which he glued directly to the ICFs. Does this sound correct?

The Total Wall and TUFF II products can be back filled against for final grading work right?

Our ICF basement is a walk out and we will be installing matching vinyl siding to the exposed walk out side. Do we need to put anything underneath the siding or do we install the siding directly to the ICFs?

Probably one of the peel 'n' stick membranes.

I'm not familiar with Total Wall. You can find info on Tuff II and sister products at www.styro.net. It can be backfilled against.

Any type of siding can be applied directly to ICF. Search this forum for siding and you'll come up with all kinds of discussion, pro and con, about most any kind of siding available and recommendations about applying it!!