Concrete Steps Repair | Cheap & Easy | PLAN LEARN BUILD

so these concrete steps are quite a mess and it can be very expensive to have somebody come in and redo all of these steps and in all intents of purposes that would probably be the best way to go is just to remove these completely and pour all new concrete in but i'm flipping a home i don't have the the budget to be able to do that um and plus we're in a backyard that there's like all these steps to get up to and really i just want to repair this so they can last you know quite a long time for somebody to be able to use this back door space so i'm going to just basically patch all of this so let's get into it and show you how to go about doing that so first off you want to take off any loose concrete anything that's going to flake off or fall off you want to get removed you want to power wash it so power wash all the dirt off i still have a little bit more cleaning to do i got leaves and stuff on here but i'm going to just basically do this step by step so i'm going to pour this concrete pad over top of this existing one today and then the next day i'll put the next one and the next one so it's going to take several days to be able to get this complete but it's going to be a lot easier than buying expensive lumber to be able to go over top of this and really i have so many other things to do it's not a big deal just to do one step a day so first thing is is to get your first riser in place and what all you really are primarily looking for is about an inch overlay of concrete over top of the top of the step and then obviously making sure it pitches down so in this particular situation it's a much higher step than i would prefer it's already at nine inches we're going to be probably about 10 inches for this first step um but i don't want to remove this whole thing so i'm just that's what i'm going to go with and the rest of the risers are approximately a normal step nine inch risers so the first step is going to be a little bit higher than a normal traditional step so if you know depends on where you live if you if the code doesn't meet this then you might not be able to do this but this is already existing i'm just working with what i have so i'm going to be basically for the first step going to be adding a 2x4 on top to be able to get my pitch and that's that'll get me and i'm going to make sure that when i do the concrete everything's pitching towards the front so the water doesn't sit in the back edge of the staircase so this will be used as a screed to be able to level that out so go ahead and get started on that so i am going to provide make this step wider so i'm going to give myself a good two inches for the face of this and then around the side as well so i'm basically expanding the entire footprint of each step all the way up if you could get a couple inches that'd be great but the topping of this just because i'm already so high i'm only going to have about an inch of concrete on top which will work fine so we got this formed now we'll take this off and clean things up and prepare it for the concrete so the first thing i want to do is get some tap cons on here so i'm going to make this so that the concrete has something to kind of grab into on the face so i'm just going to put a bunch of tap cons in the front face of this [Music] okay so now they've got that all cleaned up prepped got our cap cons in everywhere we're going to go ahead and use some adhesive this is a bonding agent to the existing old concrete so you can dilute this to one part of each so i highly recommend that because the stuff isn't cheap but it will go a long way so we're not going to need much for each step i'm going to do this at each stage so we'll just do a half a cup or half a quart i should say and then a half a quart of water and you want to just mix that up so this bonding agent is what's going to really help bond the new concrete to it so you just basically brush it in and then you have to let it sit for about two hours but this is a really important step for that concrete to bond properly otherwise it'll just kind of flake off got the bonding agent on there so now we'll just get this into place and we're going to anchor some blocks in here just to hold this to place okay so about three hours later we're ready to go ahead and pour it what we're going to be using is quick creep so it's a high strength concrete mix it's not exactly my favorite concrete but it has a really decently fine aggregate which i think is important for these stairs so we'll go ahead and mix it basically need three and a half quarts per bag or so and then what's really going to be helpful is that we're going to use a mud mixer to mix this this will allow us to get a little bit of a thicker consistency regular paddles don't usually mix concrete all that well so go ahead and probably take about three to four bags probably to do this little step down here it's okay so you do want to make sure that you're kind of pitching down which i have no problem there so this stuff doesn't have a lot of cream to it like a lot of the other concrete mixes to have so you kind of just have to jiggle it around a little bit to get the cream to come to the top we're going to let this sit for about an hour and then finish the concrete so i forgot to turn on my audio for this but really about an hour later um and i think in this situation was actually two hours later that i went ahead and started edging the corners you want to use a concrete edger for that now pay attention to your conditions if you have a lot of sunlight that's hitting the concrete pad it's going to be a lot sooner for you to get on this and actually edge it you know sunlight definitely likes to zap the moisture out of the concrete so pay attention to it but in this situation it was pretty humid out and i was able to i mean really it was almost two hours later by the time i was edging it now the concrete was a fairly wet mix so that's going to prolong the time period to do it but quikrete you know it really isn't the best for finishing you know it's really best to just go with a broom finish if you're going to use quikrete like this but the main reason i went with this again is because it had the fine aggregate and can go over top of concrete steps like this very easily so then right after i do that edging and then i'm just going to take my little brush and create some brush marks on the steps this will make it slip resistant and again quikrete is not the easiest to finish to a nice smooth surface so using a brush is going to make it look pretty nice [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] okay then any gaps that you might have you can fill in with a little bit of spray foam to fill in that gap just to keep that keep that mortar from coming seeping from the edges and then i did end up lowering this size here on a normal circumstance i would not recommend that keep them all the same but just because this is kind of a backyard and it's not like you know i don't know it just basically i would get too high at the top here to be able to make this work right so i'm making this is this is going to basically be seven and a half inches well eight inches really by the time i'm done with the concrete so basically i have three steps that are nine inches and then the rest are going to be eight you know so again uh if you want to be 100 accurate make them all the same so that there isn't any tripping hazards there but we're also going to just go ahead and box in my corner here and repair this at the same time so basically same concept just getting some kind of a ledger board on here so put some tap cons and just kind of put a a side edge here but again i have a whole bunch of tap cons that i have all prepared here so that the concrete has something to grab into [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] so for structural vertical repairs like this on the sides of my curb here i'm going to use some structural repair made by quikrete so this stuff is kind of a little bit stickier makes it a little bit easier to be able to fill in these vertical sections but the first thing you want to do since this is old concrete or even if it is new concrete um you really want to use some concrete bonding agent on this and let it dry for a couple hours and then go do the repair this really kind of opens up the pores and make sure that you get a good bond with the vertical stuff to the actual old concrete so you want to make sure everything's kind of clean and dirt free try to vacuum it up as much as you can and then we're going to dilute this we're gonna make it about uh half and half so i'm only just mixing like a quarter of it and then just applying it onto the seams so just saturate it and then we'll have to let this dry and then we can go ahead and use the actual mortar to repair it but all these areas definitely need to be filled in or water will get in them during the winter freeze and then cause a problem so if you can try to eliminate the cracks just do a little bit of maintenance i mean this is some pretty old concrete probably 100 years old so it's not unlikely that you have to do this you know once a year just try to fill in the cracks this was a repair that we did before with just a little bit of concrete mix and now we want to make it smooth and make it better more uniform and we'll do that with the structural concrete repair stuff so i'm just coating this whole area i'm not too concerned about it getting on the existing concrete it's not really that big of a deal and then if you have any areas that you need to do better on your verticals here like this is all new concrete here i'm going to fill that in to make it nice and smooth so we'll just apply this adhesive on there as well okay so you just want to mix this to a nice thick paste consistency so let's start out with like maybe half a quart of water you don't need to mix this all at once i'm going to use a mixing paddle okay so i've got this fairly fairly thick kind of like a brick mortar almost i just want something that's not going to run out of the joints so let's go ahead and fill these areas in okay so once that's set up for a little bit and then we'll just take a damp sponge and just kind of smooth this out so it kind of looks a little bit better and then once we get that top form off we'll do a final patch on some of these sides so yeah this stuff is definitely a lot nicer than just regular mortar because it just has a more thick consistency to it but most important thing is just trying to fill in those cracks eliminate water from getting in there and then freezing and then cracking even more [Music] so [Music] thank [Music] okay so now we'll go ahead and do some of our final touch-ups again we're going to be using the structural repair type of mortar this is a little bit more sticky allows you to do the vertical surfaces uh pretty easily so it's going to mix up just enough that i need and you just basically want to eye up your mixture try to make it uh you know kind of like a fairly thick consistency [Music] okay so only about 10 minutes later we're going to take a sponge and just wipe all the excess off the steps and just kind of pull it a little bit so it kind of looks so it looks nice [Music] okay so that take care that takes care of these steps now i could have been a lot more precise with my work here and i can continue to go over it with more of that structural mortar to make this look really a hundred percent but i really found that this is probably the easiest way to go about doing a whole bunch of different steps without having to spend all the money to form it and have to order concrete it becomes really stressful when you're doing this all at once but for this this is going to be great for the new homeowner and it's going to last years to come so thanks so much for watching my videos i know this is a little bit outside of my bathroom remodeling type but this is a house and i'm flipping i just figured i'd share everything i'm going uh of what i'm doing because this is really where i started bathroom remodeling i was doing a whole bunch of different home renovation projects i definitely recommend that for yourself if you ever plan on doing a bathroom make sure that you're doing other home improvement projects first get your skills and mechanical abilities in intact before you tackle on something like a bathroom remodel but hey check out my courses down below on bathroom remodeling i step you through step by step on how to go about remodeling a bathroom so all right i'll see you next video thanks you

Channel: Bathroom Remodeling Teacher

Views: 13,290

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Id: nyKooL8uZsY

Length: 28min 4sec (1684 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022