Fix a Sunken Slab with Expanding Spray Foam

hey youtube ed here with jack of all trades and welcome back to another video so what we're going to do today as you can see here is this concrete landing slab behind the service door my garage has actually sunk and it's sunk down about an inch and it actually creates a bit of a trip hazard the drainage for the water isn't quite right and in the wintertime snow removal is inherently difficult because you're constantly dealing with that ledge so what we're going to do today is we're going to raise it up we're going to put some product underneath it to keep it at that level and we're going to repair this so that it is no longer an issue so stick around let's go ahead and let's fix my concrete landing slab [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so we got the neighborhood kids outside playing so we're going to do a voiceover to try and get most of this narrative in here so let's go over the things that we're going to need for this repair first i got a couple of cans of great stuff and this is for the big cracks i got a jack i've got an old 2x4 i had laying around a hammer drill i've got a tube of polyurethane concrete self-leveling concrete sealant you can get this at your home center i've also got a 3 8 by 5 and a half inch long redhead anchor bolt you'll see what that's for here in a little bit i bought two new bits for the hammer drill they give you bits at the rental place but they're always dull so i bought a 3 8 and a quarter inch hammer drill bit and i bought a caulking gun these are the tools that you're going to need to complete this repair so let's talk about the hammer drill a little bit now you wouldn't necessarily need to have a hammer drill you could do this with just a regular half inch drill and masonry bits but drilling the holes is going to take you an exceptionally long time to do it it's well worth your time and money to spend the twenty dollars and go to your local rental place and rent a hammer drill or borrow one from your carpenter neighbor or whatever you're going to be time ahead by actually using an honest-to-god hammer drill and then just go to your local home center buy a couple of bits for this project like i said it's a 3 8 and a quarter inch hammer drill bit you'll be time ahead by doing it that way one other tool i got is a drill with a wire brush cup on it you're going to need this for some cleanup work so you can see i took my 2x4 and i made this lifting device and it's it's what you're going to actually affix to the concrete slab so you can get a jack underneath it to lift it i'm not going to go through the building process of this you guys are pretty smart i'll let you figure that part out on your own but you're going to need to make something that you can use to get the jack underneath so you can actually lift the slab up and and get it to the level that it needs to be all right so i've got my hammer drill loaded with the 3 8 bit here and i'm going to just drill right through the board and then start drilling into the concrete i'm going to do it about three inches from the end of the slab maybe about four inches doesn't really much matter you just need to have it towards the end of the slab so you've got a good solid place to lift and then once you get through the wood you're basically just marking the concrete and once you get through that portion of it you're actually just going to take and you're going to remove that board all together and then i want you to drill the hole completely through the entire slab you've got to be able to get through the slab and you'll see why later okay so now i've got the board back in place and i've got my three-eighths by five and a half inch anchor bolt and make sure that you install the nut in the washer on this before you go ahead and pound it through the wood and then you get it through the wood and you're gonna have to line it up with the hole in the slab and then go ahead and just pound it right into the slab and that anchor will hold fast it won't move anywhere so you're going to be able to lift on that board now and actually lift the slab up okay so now i've got my jack underneath the board here and i'm going to start jacking it up and you can see the board is actually bending and flexing and in all truth and honesty it breaks here in a little bit but uh it was just a little too much for that old 2x4 to uh to handle i'm gonna have to modify my lifting board and put an edge two by four on it to strengthen it up so another problem i had is that the joint was sticking because of the uh the expansion joint so i just grabbed my sawzall here and i'm just cutting around the expansion joint just to loosen it up so that thing will actually lift the slab it still doesn't help it still cracks the board but i did notice that it did start to lift it a bit and then it stopped and that was because that expansion joint uh was hanging it up but you'll see here in a minute it's going to actually crack this board and then i'm going to have to take the board off and reinforce it okay so i've got the board reinforced and i've actually got it lifted up into place and i'm just taking my leaf blower and i'm blowing away some of the debris from the expansion joint so now i've got the hammer drill loaded up with the quarter inch bit and what i'm going to do is i'm going to drill nine holes in this slab i'm going to drill three holes on the edge that i'm on right now i'm going to drill three holes dead up the middle and then i'm going to drill three more holes on the edge that's closest to you and that's actually where we're going to spray in this the expanding foam so it goes without saying you're going to have to get completely through the slab on this now most of these slabs are three and a half four inches thick so a five or six inch drill bit should be plenty long enough all right now it's time to actually start spraying in the foam so it's quite simply just a process of sticking the nozzle down in there and start spraying and foam and you'll hear a pretty audible difference in the way it sounds when you're spraying it'll sound really hollow and gurgly and then all of a sudden it'll start to muffle down and that's when you know you're starting to get to the top of the void and the foam is actually reaching the top of the concrete slab so what i'll do is i'll start in the back here and i'll kind of work my way forwards hitting each hole and making sure i get enough foam in there to actually fill the void and if you have some squeezing out the sides or coming out the cracks and things of that effect that's normal and that's the way it should be because then you know you're filling up the void [Music] okay so what i'm doing here is i've got my wide bladed spackling knife and i actually put an edge on it so it's good and sharp and i'm just cleaning up some of the excess it's been a couple hours now and this phobe is set up really well and so like i said i'm just going around and i'm cleaning up some of the excess and getting rid of the getting rid of the overflow that we really don't need you can use the same technique for each one of the little holes that you drilled to fill it just run the scraper over it fairly quickly and it'll just actually nip the little little overflow off at each hole now what i'm doing is i'm just cutting off that anchor bolt and uh we just want to cut it off shorter than what it is it doesn't have to be flush and then i just take my hammer and i just knock it off because i got tired of messing with it with the with the saw and then just take your hammer and go ahead and pound it flush and then i actually grab a punch and then i punch that bolt down into the slab don't push it all the way through you want it towards the bottom of the hole but you want to leave it in the hole because you're going to fill that up with a self-leveling sealer so now i just got a standard quarter inch drill bit nothing fancy here and i'm just cleaning out a little bit of the spray foam from each of the holes you don't want to drill all the way through you just want to drill down about maybe an inch and just get some of that foam out of there so that you can get the the self-leveling sealer in there to seal up that hole and now you just take your drill with the cupped wire brush and you just go ahead and clean off around the edges of each of those holes [Music] so now i've got the loctite pl concrete self-leveling polyurethane sealer loaded up into the caulking gun and i'm just going to go around and i'm going to fill each one of the little holes that we use to spray the spray foam into and while i've got the product loaded up in the caulking gun i'm going to go ahead and i'm just going to fill up some little voids here and there that have appeared over the course of time from using sidewalk salt in the winter and finally it's time to start sealing up the cracks on the edges now this is a self-leveling concrete sealer and it will flow and it actually flows quite runny it's about the consistency of cold maple syrup or even cold honey uh but you're gonna have to take and you're gonna have to put something in the bottom of those cracks so that that sealer doesn't just flow to the bottom and run right out of the crack anything from some foam or some old pieces of expansion joint and even a couple of cases i've used just wadded up paper towel just stuffed it down there with my spackling knife and just shoved it into the bottom of the crack so that that sealer stayed in the crack and didn't flow out so keep that in mind when you put this sealer in there you're gonna have to have something to stop it from flowing to the bottom of the crack and so there you have it the repair is complete so now all we have to do is let the let the sealant seal or let the sealant cure the can says three to seven days but it should cure to the touch here overnight or within the next day or 24 hours so it should be just fine and it's okay that it it gets touched or it gets dirt on it because it'll just make it look like the rest of the concrete and it'll it'll really look nice when it's all said and done and i'll post a picture of it here in a couple of days at the end of this video so you can see what it actually turned out like after it's after it's sat so let's go ahead and wrap this up now if you're liking this kind of content and you like this video and found it informative please make sure you hit the like and subscribe button down below make sure you ring that notification bell get notified of upcoming videos hit me with any comments anything you may have tried anything that you that you saw here that you did a little differently and maybe it worked for you let's share the information throughout the youtube community with that this is ed from jack of all trades as always thank you for stopping by and we'll see you on the next video [Music] [Music] so you

Channel: Jack of all Trades

Views: 377,068

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Id: j-P9VpGHjI4

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022