DIY Concrete Foundation for a Garage or Shed (With Curb Wall!)

hey everybody so in this video we're going to do a diy concrete foundation for a garage or a shed now this was the gravel base that the homeowner had done he took control of that so he hired an excavator to come in here and dig this out install the gravel dig the trenches around the outside and what he hired me to do was a six inch thick concrete slab with the edges thickened to about 12 inches thick so this is a what we typically call a monolithic slab and you could use this for a garage or a shed like i said so the first part was just to get the forms set up so we had to get everything off the truck get them laid in place it's 16 by 24 so we could use 16 footers for each end and then we had a 16 footer and i cut an 8 footer for the two sides to make it 24. so we're going to get these all laid in place and then i i'll get them screwed together and then we can get them up and pinned and squared and set the grade but this was this was the basic process right here of getting it formed up now the subgrade you know the gravel they used was kind of what i call boning you can see those bigger rocks there i typically like a little bit finer gravel but it's perfectly good enough for what we're doing here you know the excavator dug that out probably a couple feet put in a couple feet of gravel and compacted it and lifts six or eight inch lifts as he put it in and that's what we were left with it was actually pretty level when i checked it with the laser so it was pretty easy to work with other than driving the pins in and hitting some of those big rocks that was a that was kind of a pain so what we're doing now is we're measuring out our lengths to make sure we got our exact measurements so i want to measure out 24 feet there and then i can screw that corner then i measure over my 16 in the back get that corner screwed and then measure back up here 24 feet mark it and then i can get that corner screwed in place and that gives me my exact dimensions on the slab that i need and then the next step will be just to get it squared we basically go you know diagonal corner to corner make sure we get the exact same measurement and i've never had a problem squaring a slab that way it's always been perfectly square we just slide one side you know one way or the other until we get the exact same measurements and then we double check and when we do that's good then we'll get the corners pinned and then run a string and then we get everything else pinned in place so that's basically about as easy as it is i teach all this stuff to guys in the concrete underground so if you want to check that out there's a link down below in that and i have a concrete slab course where i go over everything step by step and in a lot more detail than a video like this so we're just putting wire mesh in here for reinforcement and then we're going to put a double row of rebar in the edge and i'll tie it right to the wire so when we pour we'll have that reinforcement right in the concrete and we also usually use a fiber mesh reinforcement in the concrete too so we have a double reinforcement and that's a pretty simple basic pour for us you know we use the fiber mesh and in a case like this we'll use the wire with the double row rebar i'm gonna use i'm gonna use my my top con laser for this this is a self leveling laser so i basically just take it out of the box set it on hit the on button it self levels itself and then that's what we use to set our grades with once we get our grade set then we just screw the boards right to the pin like this i have a link for that laser down in the description below too guys if you want to check that out that's what i recommend for a laser for any type of construction work like this that's probably the best one i've ever used all right so it's poor day and we're gonna get this poured we got a 3500 psi mix with fiber mesh in it it's got a little bit of air entrainment because of freeze and thaw here in maine and then we also use a uh mid-range water reducer so we can pour you know a six or seven inch slump that slump is how wet or dry the concrete is six or seven is fairly loose it's a good workable slump but with the water reducer it doesn't hurt the strength i need to pour it that loose you can see i'm pulling up on the wire as i go so i'm getting that up in the concrete and we'll get a slab this size you know for us we'll get 90 some odd percent of it poured right out before we start screeding it we're going to be able to screed right off the top of those forms so that's going to make it a lot easier too when we do something like this now we're going to put a a 2 foot knee wall on top of this thing also so make sure you stick around for the end of the video to see the knee wall we did that came out really really nice occasionally the owner will ask for some type of knee wall on it whether it's a eight inch curb or a twelve inch curb or a 2 foot curb and we'll go back and we'll we'll do that knee wall we usually typically do them afterwards on top of the slab [Music] this one this this garage slab was cut into a banking so he wanted to be able to back fill up a little higher so we're going to put a two footer on this one luke's using the big dobby on the edges to mag float the edges you can see that that works pretty nice this is basically how we do most our pours we'll get most of the concrete poured out first then we'll jump right back and and get it screeded because it really doesn't take us very long to screed if this is something you're doing yourself you know you don't need to pour this much out like we do you could pour out a third of this and get it screeded then pour do it in thirds like that you could do half of it if you want but basically you got so much time per truck per yard and as long as you pour within your allotted time they won't charge you any extra every company is a little different so just check with them ours is about seven or eight minutes per yard so we have you know this is ten and a half yards we got here so 70 or 80 minutes and this basically probably took us 15 or 20 minutes to pour something like this with the four of us so you can you should be able to get it down in time we're using a magnesium screed we've got all kinds of different lengths so we're just using the 14 footer here because we can we can wet screen they do make a 16 footer so if we had a 16 footer we could screen right off the top of the forms i just we like the 14 for doing most our stuff when we hand screed you can see how easy that is for us to screen we kind of kick in our feet kicking the the holes left by our boots as we screed so we just keep going without stopping and now that we know we don't have too much concrete in there we can fill in the rest we don't want a big pile outside we typically want just a little bit more than we need and then when we step out we can just finish off the screening process i'm going to be sticking in some rebar uprights here too to kind of anchor that curveball on top of the slab tia's gonna grab the bowl float she's gonna she's gonna both out this stuff the concrete we use when it's a 3 500 pound mix it both floats really really nice usually just one pass down and back with a six inch slump seven inch slump like this and it fills it in really good makes it nice and smooth now you could leave it both loaded if you want for a finish you could go over it with a fresno to finish it you could power trowel it we're gonna stay and power trial this today and get it really nice and smooth and we saw cut some joints in it but you can see how smooth the bolt float leaves it the only thing the bull float does is it leaves those a little bit of a line on each end here's me putting in the upright i'm going to put these i don't know every five or six feet around the outside and that'll kind of tie in the knee wall that's going on top well that's the slab pour and then the curb wall is coming right up we're gonna put aluminum forms two foot high all the way around this thing and then we'll just bond out for the garage door and the pass door hey everybody mike here so we're getting ready to pour this little knee wall right here on top of the slab we did the other day it's a two foot knee wall we're gonna go all the way around it this is the garage door opening right here so we'll leave that out and we got a little man door three foot door over there we're gonna leave out but this is it two foot panels we got aluminum panels they're three foot these panels are three feet and start from here go to here with all three foot panels and we'll just pour the concrete right inside we've got a matter rebar a couple a couple rows of rebar in there we got reebok uprights coming up out of the slab so this is it [Applause] that's it we got it all filled in time to top it off now top perform is top of wall here's the bond out for the garage door right there you were using the dewalt pencil vibrator to make sure everything's vibrated really good that thing works really really good to vibrate so when we pull these panels you know we'll show you after we pull them be another day or two but these walls are going to be really really smooth these aluminum forms give you a really nice smooth finish [Applause] how'd you get this job all right so we got a 16 by 24 slab done we got a two foot wall we put on it knee wall we did the knee wall after using aluminum forms you can see how nice that came out three foot panels and then you know you get your filler panels 16 by 24 got the rough opening for the garage rough opening for a pass door that's it came out really nice let's see how square everything lined up really nice looks good

Channel: Mike Day Concrete

Views: 870,605

Keywords: concrete, how to concrete, diy concrete, how to pour concrete, how to form concrete, concrete finishing techniques, concrete skills, concrete floor, concrete slab, stamped concrete, how to, concrete tools, how to pour a concrete slab, how to pour a concrete floor, how to pour a concrete driveway, how to pour a concrete patio, how to build concrete steps, how to form concrete stairs, pouring concrete, finishing concrete

Id: RM6tVtkCfBM

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021