DRY POUR CONCRETE WALKWAY: 4 Inches Thick WITH Reinforcement. Anyone Can Do It!

hey y'all welcome back to Cajun Country Living as you all can tell we are already standing in our farm for our next Friday pour concrete living in south Louisiana one of the big issues that we have is dealing with mud sometimes we get a lot of rain and we don't get much of a break from it so the area going into our porch has been a muddy mess ever since we've got the porch put together we did have some rocks right here but we decided to pull them up and go ahead and do a dry pour so this project is going to be a little bit different than the two previous videos that we put out before pertaining to this this lab is actually going to be four inches thick it's going to have reinforcement and it might even end up with a little different finish than you'd imagine as you all can tell we got the first steps done of our dry Port if you all need a detailed explanation of how to get to this step make sure to go check out our last video I'm gonna put the link right here on the screen and we're going to show you all real quick how we did this a little bit differently than we did the first two so this walkway is going to end up being five foot by five foot six we wanted to make sure the width of the walkway was exactly the width of our French doors leading into the main entrance of our home now we're going to be totally honest with you we do not need a four inch slab here but we got so many questions about how do you do a four inch slab because we normally do them an inch and a half but then again that's mostly just for foot traffic and they held up really good and you can see that if you watch the video where we built the slab for our chicken coop so when we figured out exactly where we wanted this Farm to sit out one thing that you got to keep in mind if you want it perfectly square is to make sure that you go from corner to corner with your measurements in building these forms is incredibly simple to do all we did was cut one two by four five feet long and cut the two longer boards five foot seven and a half that way whenever we butted up the two before which is an inch and a half thick that left us with five foot and six inches in our last video we laid the two by fours flat to show that you could do that and we mattered the corners to fit them together on an angle so either way works fine so a couple things to keep in mind when you're doing something like this that's going to go up against your house your porch some area that you want to be able to control your water flow the outside edge of the slab is going to be level so on your two sides you want them running downhill on an angle depending on how long of a slab you pour you want a little more angle this is going to be a relatively short walkway so we're just going to put a little better than a quarter of inch and fall so now that we're at the point that we can [Music] we can just absolutely be wearing a mask for us we're just going to be really mindful of the wind it is 90 degrees out here today it is humid and the Sun is beating right down on us so putting on that mask is going to create so much more heat for us we're just going to be very very mindful of which way the wind is blowing and y'all make the decision on your own part but Safety First definitely do wear a mask if you're doing this at home so this time we brought our concrete a lot closer to the slab last time we got a million questions saying why did y'all move the truck a lot closer well something that we didn't show y'all was that the ground had actually been pretty wet because of all the rain that we had so everything was very soft which meant that we could not back the truck up any closer without us riding up the yard but this time we got dry weather and we parked our concrete real close being as this is going to be a thicker slab that we usually pour and we're going to add reinforcement we're going to fill the form halfway up with concrete making this slab thicker with reinforcement wire is going to make it incredibly strong you can be able to drive over it you can do whatever you want now the reason that we made this five foot wide was a reason besides just wanting to match these doors the wheelbase on our side by side is five inches outside the outside and sometimes we like to back it on the porch and unload things and this is going to be the perfect width to do that now we are definitely not saying that in order to be able to back something or drive something on this it needs to be four inches and have structural reinforcement in it so you'll just keep in mind that we are doing this for y'all we have drove on our slab that's an inch and a half thick with Jim's truck which is an F250 so if that doesn't tell you anything that concrete this way is very very strong which we're going to get into later but let's go ahead and get this done a store-bought 2x4 is an inch and a half by three and a half the area inside air form averages about a half inch lower than the bottom of our foreman boards this gives us the average thickness of four inches for this walkway foreign Creek these 80 pound sacks run five dollars and 13 cents at Home Depot and for these forms we use 13 and a half bags adding up to 71.82 cents [Music] [Music] well for reinforcement wire you can use just about anything you want you can use rebar you can use chicken wire I've seen people use chain leak fence knit wire you name it make sure that your reinforcement wire isn't touching your forms if it is it will be exposed to the environment allowing it to rust expand and eventually cause cracking and now that we have a reinforcement wire laid in position let's finish filling up the forms with concrete [Music] we poured this wall play right up against our porch slab we don't have ground freezing and Heaven issues here if you live in an area that experiences ground freezing I definitely put in some kind of expansion joint so that your slab can move up and down freely with the ground we do start the screening process before we have the form completely full of concrete this will help spread out the concrete and let you know how much more you need to add to the farm thank you now you've just seen us run the screed across the top here you see all these rocks the reason you see these rocks is because we did not have enough concrete here the concrete needs to be higher than the foreman boards and when you're making that solid action it's going to make that powder settle out and it's going to bury those rocks into the slab just like it did right here so this side we had plenty of concrete and right here we just didn't have enough [Music] foreign [Music] we have a few small voids here so we are going to add just a pinch of concrete to all these small areas then run back over with the screen [Music] oh my God [Music] foreign [Music] so in our last video I used this edger to make a nice soft Edge on the edge of the slab on this one we're not going to do that so we really don't have a need the Landscaping is going to butt up to both sides of this lab I love this part it makes such a huge transition we had a lot of questions around the paint roller on finishing the concrete so a couple things you want to make sure that your paint roller is dry I use a 3 8 snap or a half inch nap whatever's available and the finish that it's going to leave on your concrete gives the appearance that it is really really smooth and that can be concerning like in a wet condition you might be afraid you're going to slip on it or something the texture it leaves is actually like a sandpaper non-skid effect you're not going to slip on this stuff so at this point just to clarify there has been no water added at all none oh that's a great Point we've had people say why don't you wet the ground before you do this it could speed up the process the fact is the concrete absorbs this moisture so fast and if you run into taking a little more time than you want to on this you can actually start getting wet spots all the way through from the moisture that it's soaking up from the ground that causes an issue when you get ready to put the finish on your slab it'll all be dry and have two or three wet spots and that finish won't look good in there so we always try to leave it as dry as we possibly can of course when you do a slab like this feel free to try different things you may like it that way who knows foreign [Music] so at this point you can start watering but before we show you all the details into that we're going to show y'all the custom finish that we're going to put on this walkway [Music] we thought we live in south Louisiana why not throw some alligator skin down there so I found this roller on Amazon I believe it ran about twenty dollars so if this works good you all stay tuned for our house bill because I guarantee you it's going to make another appearance somewhere in the house on a wall who knows where now we've never done this before so you are watching it and we are watching it together so if it looks horrible and we can all watch us mess up together but I think it'd be all right to be noted once again [Music] [Music] remember if you try something like this and it don't turn out the way you like it just go over it again with your paint roller and smooth it right out it's just like using an eraser you can start over from scratch we apply different pressures while rolling this design on our walkway we like the contrast that it gave [Music] foreign [Music] some people might not agree but I think that's probably one of the freaking coolest things we've ever done it was pretty awesome it really is like a alligator skin textured concrete walkway if that don't scream south Louisiana then I don't know it does we've got our texture on we both absolutely love it so time to start watering and this is something that we didn't get into much detail last time about so this time we're really going to hit it in a lot of great detail for y'all so the first thing to keep in mind whenever you're going to be missing is that you're going to miss for the first hour and then you're going to come back an hour later and Mist again and whenever I say mist I mean hold the mister at least four or five feet above the concrete slab and continuously move your arm so it's just going to be like this it's gonna be very very fine and it's going to take just a minute but all that concrete is going to turn just a little bit of a darker color the reason that we use the misting setting and we keep such a high distance away is because y'all got to keep in mind that this is a fine powder so the closer that you get and the more force that you put on with this water the more that it's going to wash all that away now if that's a look that you're going for you can absolutely do that oh [Music] if you want to do one of these slabs for yourself here is a quick and easy way to figure out how many bags of concrete that you'll need the first thing you need to know are you going to be using 80 pound sacks or 60 pound sex there is point six cubic feet of material in a 80 pound sack and there's 0.45 cubic feet in a 60 pound sack the formula to figure this is length time width time height measured in feet the Hat represents the thickness of your slab so in order to convert those inches into feet you just divide the inches by 12. so here's an example right here of a four foot by four foot by four inch slab use an 80 pound bags of concrete so now Lydia's got this thing misted down for the first time we're gonna wait an hour we're gonna come back and we're gonna miss it again what we found is a rule of thumb after you missed it and that top little bit of crust starts getting hard to where it won't damage your finish whenever you start to shower the rule of thumb that we use is we should give it two showers per inch and so far it has worked out really really good so if you have a four inch lab we water it eight times one of the things that we got asked a lot was my Lord it takes so much time why would you even consider doing that in all actuality it takes about 30 minutes to pour a slab this size and it takes about 10 seconds to dampen it down and the other time we're doing other things we're not even thinking about that slant we'll set a reminder it will go off we'll come back out here another 10 15 seconds just damping it down going about our business think about mixing it is I mean it's perfectly fine people's been doing that for years and years and it works great but you mix it pour it you finish it bam bam bam that's what you have to do the way we do it if you get halfway done with it and you get tired you could go in the house and cool off you've got all the time in the world because all you have is dry powder sitting in a wooden box it ain't gonna hurt a thing now it's time for the second misting [Music] the top has now began to get firm after the second misting so now we turn our nozzle to the shower setting and start our shower Cycles so you all remember the rule of thumb this is going to take a total of eight showers since it's a four inch slab here is this lab on the very next morning it doesn't need any more water but we wanted to demonstrate how fast the water Wicks into the concrete so if you're concerned that there's going to be spots that are dry powder let us put your mind at ease we poured the slab two days ago so it is officially day three of our dry pour concrete as you can see most of this concrete is this lighter color there's a few darker areas around the outside edge of these farming boards that's moisture still it's not completely dry there but that's just fine we're going to go ahead and pull these farming boards off see what this thing looks like for us what has worked the best is waiting two days to pull the forms now if you have time it is absolutely not going to hurt anything to leave these forms on as long as you want to but for us whenever we start seeing these forms pull away from the slab we know that it's ready to come off now if you're in an absolute hurry you can pull the forms off the next day in the last video that we did about pouring a concrete slab we actually pull those forms the very next day I don't even think it was a full 24 hours that we went ahead and pulled them to be in our comfort zone we like to wait at least two days okay let's pull them up and see [Music] so you're in a hurry well you better calm down [Music] cause if you're in a hurry [Music] thank you [Music] we couldn't leave you all hanging so we wanted to finish up the front to show you all the final look overall we spent less than 150 on this whole area [Music] since our last drop for video we have had people reach out letting us know how much our driveway is beneficial to them from comments saying they can now pour walkways for Walkers and wheelchairs to pour in a whole driveway and we do wish that we could be there every step of the way with everybody who's been doing this we want everyone to know that that right there is why we do this so many people have come up with great ideas and uses for this around their home and it warms our heart to be able to provide y'all with whatever help we can we have a lot more dry for projects coming up from different texture finishes to inside home projects we'll be showing y'all every application that we can think of to use this method also we're going to be putting our Drive Port to the test so make sure you're subscribed to our channel so you don't miss a thing we'll see you on Wednesday Cajun family foreign [Music]

Channel: Cajun Country Livin'

Views: 1,661,829

Keywords: Cajun Country Livin, Cajun Country living, concrete, quikcrete, concrete projects, spring projects, off grid living, crockers, shed build, backyard ideas, backyard makeover, country living, diy shed, diy concrete, diy fire pit, easy projects, pouring concrete, dry concrete, YouTube series, family channel, cement, dry pour, chicken coop, small slab, summer project, diy patio, new way to pour concrete, cheap slab, cheap diy, on a budget, how to, good search, good simple

Id: _50MXEHr678

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023