DIY Easy-crete Sidewalk

we have a poorly draining yard and most of the problem is that this yard is only about a foot higher than the street where the water drains to and it's a good 350 feet so basically we have flat drainage does drain there is slope but we get heavy rains in Louisiana and sometimes we'll have a couple inches sitting here in the grass and that was a problem when we built a house because Debbie studio is in the back my shop is in the back and at the time the concrete ended where my truck back tires are because we were a little short on cash so that driveway that you see there was not in place so we were doing a demolition job at work and I drug home some creosote Timbers and I built this little walkway when I ran out of creosote Timbers I switched to some treated boards that I found on the side of the road it was somebody's deck they had pulled up and it lasted a pretty good while the treated stuff kind of gave out maybe four or five years ago so I'll replace the treated part with this stone built a little bridge for the kids and a little planner and now the creosote boards have given up the ghost it will probably fifty or sixty years old when I got him and they've hung in there for fifteen years I guess but I'm in the process of pulling them up and I'm gonna put a concrete walkway the rest of the way [Music] this time this stormy cloud the story [Music] [Applause] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we got all the old wood up and disposed of originally built that walkway up off the ground for one of the reasons was old this water went underneath it and went towards the driveway over the years the drainage has changed a little bit and this water started going around this way so we took out a big tree and I paved this area back here there's a pretty good bit of work but now all the water on this side of the walkway gets out real easily water on the other side gets out slower but I guess my point is I don't have to worry about water crossing under this walkway I can just put the walkway on the ground the right now the ground is really soft and wet because it's just the end of our winter and our oak tree is dormant once the summer kicks in this oak tree will suck all the moisture out the ground and it'll be hard as a rock but again it's just a walkway there will be no vehicle traffic it's just to keep our feet clean so I'm not gonna worry too much about the structural side of it I'm just gonna put down about three inches of concrete okay with a sharp shovel I went along and kind of halfway leveled it out I don't have any forms to go by yet so this is just kind of preliminary work I'm gonna get my mower and cut down some vegetation give me a little room to operate and I wish there weren't so many roots in there but there's a million all right with my big mower set as low as it would go I ran over to a couple of times and now I got something now I can see where the hopes are and I got room to work I got one oak tree root that I got to work around and I think that was the only big roof everything else is all this ground cover there's a lump right here on the side but I got to dig and see if that's a root or just dirt okay progress removed most of the vegetation with the mower did a little bit of grading went to show we'll just knock some bumps down and then I started one side of the form using some like presiding it's really long and limber and actually it's a little bit rotten but it's okay for this and I didn't really have a plan I just kind of followed where the old walkway was and where the grave worked out for the best ran one side all the way stood back and looked at it for a little while and went back and changed a couple of curves especially where they came into the existing concrete and then I got to the other form and to set it I used a four foot level I don't think you can see it in the video but there's two marks with a sharpie on it that that's my width and then with the level I can make sure that I have slope one way or the other you can see in the background I have a laser level and I did some checking to make sure that the lowest part of this concrete walkway was going to be high enough to drain but not so high that it would drain back onto my carport it's really kind of tight the forms are set and with the exception of this first maybe six feet I need some fill I need it would be nice to have a half a load of sand but I don't have that is all of this it's like five inches four and a half inches not and I don't have extra mixing this in the wheelbarrow I want to keep it all three inches it so ordered eight yards of feel sand paid for eight yards of feel saying it came on a six yard truck so I'm not sure how that works but I don't think it worked in my favor but anyway I got plenty of saying step one and pour in my little squares is to put two sand in and screed it and I just used to float the same float I'm floating the concrete with these three squares this morning and I'm gonna go try to do three more this afternoon I divided the walkway up into lots of little squares they're about 38 to 40 something inches long on average most of them and then you measure and just put up a bulkhead the bulkheads are thin pieces of Cypress it's a psyche presiding and I'm gonna just leave them in place and doing this for two reasons one is I'm an old man and I have a hard time bending over for long periods of time so this is more manageable to pour these little squares one at a time but the main reason was I'm pretty sure this oak trees gonna heave this concrete over time and you know that's okay and unless it causes a trip hazard and debbie has customers that come between the house in her studio so I can't afford to have a sidewalk with a trip hazard and if I poured and had lots of little squares and the tree heaves a section then I can just deal with one section at a time each section is about three bags so that's about what less than 250 pounds and I'm putting some little slip dowels with a 16 penny galvanized nail I'm hoping that'll help hold them together a little bit okay I got the next three sections with the sand fill this is gonna make it a lot nicer and I have visqueen to put down and I don't consider that a vapor barrier but it's pretty important because when you pour concrete on dirt it keeps the concrete from mixing with the dirt or the soil or the sand the bottom half inch or so and giving you you lose strength on that part it keeps the concrete where the concrete needs to be and it also keeps the sand or the soil whatever you're pouring on from sucking the water out to concrete which can which is dry enough it can reduce the overall strength of the concrete but at the least it makes it hard for a old man to keep up it's hard to quick so I'll do three squares because I can keep up with that and then I'll stand up for a few hours and maybe I'll get three more squares this afternoon I mixed a lot of bags of concrete I went through a pallet and probably maybe 15 more bags mixed in a wheelbarrow one bag at a time and a couple of tips if you're gonna mix a lot of concrete by one of those masonry hoes it makes it very much easier and another thing is if you can get a hose and a nozzle that doesn't leak you will make your little site a whole lot neater I can't seem to do that I think we buy our hoses and nozzles with a leak arty you know because I had three different hoses and four different nozzles no matter what I did the ground turned into a mud hole because I had so many leaks I probably mix this wetter well I know I did then it should be for optimum strength but you know prerogative I just wanted it a little more manageable for me to float in place another thing I tried to do is every time I dumped a wheelbarrow of concrete into the form I went ahead and leveled it out and that's because each time I mixed one the water content was a little different I didn't measure it just use the hose and if you when it comes time to finish in the concrete if you got one little area that's mixed kind of dry and one low area this makes it kind of wet it makes it more tricky so if you spread out each load you won't have to deal with that finishing time this is a float it is made out of some sort of aluminum alloy or magnesium alloy or they still make them out of wood and it is not a finishing tool is a placing tool this is what you used to screed to concrete to get it to the in the right place it's robust you can jam it concrete in the corners you're not the world without bending it and it has a high coefficient of friction which allows it to pull the cream to the top while it's pushing the rocks down if you have a tool that's made out of steel it's not a float it's a trowel this is a float and this is what we use to get the concrete in the right place so if this concrete was a little drier like it probably should have been use the same method to screed it off it'd just be a little more work you'd have to pull harder with the screed board and you'd have to push and prod harder with the float but it would be the same thing I just got myself some slack and below water in the concrete and once it's greeted you really need to leave it alone in a little while the surface will become wet it's cold bleed water and once there's bleed water on it you don't want to mess with it because if you try to float or travel concrete with bleed water you're just going to force that water into the surface and you're gonna probably have some spalling later on so you get your concrete screed it out half your works done just get out the way and let uh let it do its thing this is the first lab I poured this afternoon and it's kind of borderline but because I'm going to set tile in it I want it to be soft I'm gonna get on it a little prematurely so I'm gonna go ahead and do the edger and then I'm gonna float it one time and then I'm going to start putting tiles in if you were after a finish that would be more durable smoother harder you would wait till it sets a little bit of a bleed water will be gone and you get on a good you steel trowel and you force the fines to get between the not-so fines and you force the little sand particles between the big sand particles and you just keep pushing on that surface and consolidating it and the surface would get harder and smoother a lot of physical work in my case I'm setting these tiles in it I'm gonna set the tiles in it while it's still kind of wet so they'll stay and I want a heavy rough blue finish because I this is under this tree it never sees any Sun it tends to get kind of nasty and I don't want it to be slippery so this is a a little bit different there'll be no steel trowel finish on this little walkway and it'll be finished very roughly do not walk in the concrete again I went to the restore the local salvage store to get some tile that I could cut in two strips because I I wanted to make the branch look tree look and they had this stuff it's already cut this is awesome ten bucks a box probably originally a whole lot more than that the race for the Sun and the race for the moon I cut out of this granite sink cutout wasn't very pleasant but I didn't have that many um to do in an effort to keep the copper tubing from popping out the top of the concrete and all of them have stainless steel screws screwed into the bottom of it kinda like a little Nelson stud so going back to what I was saying earlier about the float in the trowel the float is designed with its high coefficient of friction to pull fines to the surface it's rough on the bottom where it's not finished steel trowel is finished on the bottom and it is designed to do that opposite and it's designed to force the fines down into the surface Paul my neighbor dropped by and kind of was wondering why I was doing what I was doing and I really had no good reason other than I kind of like whimsical I think there's enough seriousness in the world I had kind of had fun doing it will it last I think it will these are interior tiles so the finish could be susceptible to fading from the Sun but there is no Sun under this tree ever it's an evergreen and we don't have freeze-thaw cycles so I don't think that'll be an issue thank the copper will stay put but it might come loose from corrosion if it does I'll peel it up and replace it with colored grout which will be almost as good [Music] DFA [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] zwei you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Barry Luke Builds

Views: 268,188

Rating: 4.8063293 out of 5

Keywords: DIY easycrete, DIY sackcrete, DIY concrete walkway, DIY new walkway, DIY concrete finishing, Setting tiles in concrete, Sprucing up a sidewalk, mixing sack crete, mixing easycrete, working with easycrete

Id: 7fLzQ-lT89M

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2019