How to DRY POUR CONCRETE SIDEWALK

[Music] [Music] hey y'all welcome back to asan country living today we're over here at my mom and dad's house and we're going to be replacing their [Music] sidewalk now this has been one of our top maybe three requested drop pores and we are so excited to be showing you all this cuz not only is it going to be a sidewalk but it's also going to be budding up to the side of the existing slab so there's going to be two different things that we're going to be showing youall that we're going to be doing today and to top it all off the cherry on this is it's extremely windy I don't know if you can see this or not but huge wind gust so we get a lot of these questions about hey can you do a whole sidewalk do you have to do it in sections can you pour it all at one time can you dry pour in the wind so we're going to try to cover all of that today it looks like yeah we're going to be answering All Those Questions a lot of things that y'all always ask us we're going to try to hit on in this video as well so y'all make sure to stay tuned tuned we're going to start working on this sidewalk and give you all a little update of how we got to this [Music] point this existing sidewalk has been here for decades my uncle will actually poured each one of these pavers by hand but over the years these papers do what they do they settle and shift over time which has made this sidewalk a tripping Hazard to say the least [Music] now I have to say removing this sidewalk is Bittersweet to me because these pavers has been here my whole life I walked and played on these things for many many years but hey not all changes bad and as you can see it was definitely time for upgrade [Music] [Music] we align this first string straight with the porch to make sure that the sidewalk would be perfectly straight [Music] [Music] [Music] then we measured over 3 ft to set our next dring [Music] [Music] we painted the ground where these string lines are as a reference because we're going to be taking down these strings while we're digging out some of this grass and that way we'll know where to stop [Music] digging we actually had to dig down more than we initially planned because elevation directly in front of this porch is much higher than the rest of the surrounding yard now it's time to put our Forman boards together and get them straight with our string line [Music] [Music] this area here used to always accumulate water on the east side of the existing sidewalk every time it rain so we're going to be installing a piece of 2in PVC here to allow the water to flow under underneath this new [Music] sidewalk now this sidewalk is a 75x 3T sidewalk we get this an awful lot it's like what do you put on your fan boards as a release agent to pull the fan boards off the answer is nothing it is just a board it's got nothing on it and it will come right off it doesn't stick it don't even try to stick they just come off of these a couple of other really common things is is why don't you put plastic down and where is your rock you don't have any rock well the first thing is is we do put plastic under anything that we're going to be building a structure on top of because the concrete is porous we talk about this all the time and the moisture will absorb up through the concrete you don't want that coming up inside your building that's the reason you put the plastic underneath it and you pour the concrete on top of it that plastic keeps the moisture from coming up in the slab this slab is outside it's going to get rained on it's going to have the moisture out of the air in it there is absolutely no reason unless you just want to put it to put it and the next thing is is let's put a bunch of rock in here and then beat it down into the dirt and then pour concrete on top of it now if you want to do that that's absolutely nothing wrong with it and I'm not saying that it's wrong but the way I view that is that if you put Rock On Top of the dirt that you're going to pour the concrete on anyway you're going to have the same result so this is just the way we do it and today we have poured a lot of these things and we have had no issues heck we even poured that one with the grass still there oh yeah and that's something that we do also now that's if you're going to put something that's going to hold a little bit of a load you want to get rid of some of the top saw and and try to get down to a hard compactible saw but just walking on it no we're going now another thing that we're not going to do on this sidewalk is put any kind of Steel reinforcement in that's rebar high tensil wire anything of that sort and the reason is is this is only going to feel foot traffic you can put it in here by all means if you'd like to but for this we don't feel like it's needed so we're not going to do it because it's not going to feel any kind of weight load like vehicle traffic or any type of significant weight [Music] oh these are Light bags though oh are they yeah these only weigh 80 lbs now Lydia poured out the first bag and I know you've seen at this point that we don't have any kind of a respirator on any kind of dust mask any of that kind of stuff we would highly recommend that if you do this you wear a dust mask we're not going to do it because the wind is blowing like a hurricane in that direction and we're going to be working on this side it's going to take that dust away from us it's our personal preference but we're just not going to wear one today I don't think that we have found like dumping it all out and then spreading it works better or if you spread it as you go I think it's all just about personal preference today we're just going to be dumping out a few bags spreading it but I don't think we're going to screed until a little bit later on but that's just kind of what we're going to be doing today it probably depends on your project as well because I know sometimes you can't have access to like the back section or something but today we don't have that problem now I feel like this is a golden opportunity too to say something about the type of mix that we use we still get that question a lot and to answer that question the type of concrete that we use is whatever is at The Big Box store and whatever is cheapest we've used almost every brand at this point and you get the same result the only thing that we found really in any of these mixes That Vary a little bit is the color of the product itself some are a little grayer than others some end up curing a little more on the tan side that's the only [Music] difference oh oh oh oh oh need a refund on that bag [Music] [Music] so on this end of our sidewalk we have a board right here and it is going to come to an abrupt stop like you see most sidewalks have but on the other end we're going to do more of a taper off because it just needs to taper off and match up to the end of the road so that's going to be two different ways that we're going to be doing it in this video in particular so y'all are gonna be able to see the way that both of them turn out [Music] [Music] n [Music] [Music] so now we've got about 15 20ish feet of the concrete poured out into our forms so what we're going to do now is go ahead and start screeing as you can see JY already is back here ready with our board so we're going to show you all that process and the reason that we're going to go ahead and do that and not wait till the end is because if we have a bunch of buildup then we're not going to have to get Buckets and dump it out elsewhere or if we need to add some we can go ahead and do that while we're here [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now one thing to note here is that we're using a 2x4 on its Edge to screed with the actual width of it is an inch and 5/8 we found that everything that we have used a screed with this definitely works the best this sawing action that you see is making the rock in the concrete mix sink leaving the powder on the top for the finishing process [Music] [Music] [Music] it's always so satisfying for me when it comes time to use this edger it really begins to take shape during this process we use a dry paint roller to finish the dry pour concrete and yes I did say dry paint roller make sure not to wet it at this step it does an amazing job smoothing the finishing surface of the actual concrete and that is why we've always said anybody can do this because not many people know how to finish wet mixed concrete to make it look good but almost everybody can and has used a paint roller and using this is so simple and the results are unbelievable [Music] [Music] [Music] he [Music] we dug down about 3 in at the very edge of this ramp here we wanted to make sure it was thick enough on the edge so it wouldn't crack or chip in the future now it's time to begin the water in sequence I have the garden nozzle set to mist now it's very important to only darken the powder you don't want to get too much water at this stage remember this is a dry poure and less is always more in this situation [Music] if you notice my nozzle's dripping water so I'm making sure to stand back so that that's not dripping onto my con great I'm on the second misting phase now we're not going to go into great detail about the watering schedule here but we will put up a dry po watering guide right here for y'all to screenshot if you'd like to see the watering process in great detail we have other videos where we go into a lot of detail we've waited a total of three days to pull the forms off of this concrete slab while we were waiting we got 6 and 1 half inches of rain during those 3 days we would have actually pulled these forms a lot sooner but being that we had that 6 and half inches of rain we really don't want to get out here and Wade in the actual standing water that was surrounding this concrete so like we discussed whenever we started this whenever we began pouring this we had a lot of wind it was really not a great situation to be dry pouring you would think uh followed by that I mean like immediately like at the end of the watering cycle we started getting rain and lots of it so this sidewalk meant some of probably the worst actual poring conditions that you could probably get but man it turned out fantastic I think that we're all extremely happy with the way that it came out and we're so excited to show yall we're excited to get down here start pulling these forms P up around here and then it'll be done but before we get to yanking these farming boards off and taking a look at the side of this laab and what we hopes is going to be perfect but who knows this whole project now this sidewalk was about 3 and 1/4 in thick on average it was 75 ft long and 3T wide the total cost was 58784 or 70t does not seem that long but whenever you add the three foot that we did it it it really adds up y'all so 225 square feet that's really not a bad price for concrete I didn't think so either it would be hard to get a professional to come do this at your home for that absolutely now in that total cost that's the cost of the actual 80 lb bag from the local Big Box store and the lumber that we used so that's not leaving anything else the only thing that we didn't include were the taxes because the taxes vary from wherever you're watching this thing from the one of the best things about this dry pour is if you were doing this at home and you were following the way that we did this dry pour you don't have to make it three and a half inches we were just making it level with the porch that was already existing that way there wasn't a step down at a normal sidewalk is typically not even this thick whenever you wet pour but at this point y'all seen what we did we poured it all at one time one of the questions we get asked a lot is is it better to do this all at one time or in sections we kicked the thought around of pouring it in 10ft sections till we got it done but we just really wanted to knock it out but if you want to do that it is totally fine to just pour it a section at a time and it'll turn out just like what we have here we actually have some people that sent us some pictures of their driveway that they did and they did it in sections they love to share their dry pour they're in a cold climate they're in an area that they have a full Four Seasons and they still did this and they drive their car on it every single day so I'm going to be posting those pictures right here and y'all this is just such a great option for people who don't have the capability to have people come to their house or a project that's somewhere where it's wet and you can't even get a truck in or even like a small backyard where you can't haul a big load of conrete at one time [Music] o [Music] [Music] oh oh [Music] [Music] [Music] you know a couple years ago whenever me and Lydia decided to put our method that we have perfected out to the world and share it with everybody the whole thought process behind doing that was to give somebody the opportunity to have a nice sidewalk to have a wheelchair room or just to have anything that you wanted you know small project whatever the project may be you could actually do it yourself for pennies on the dollar compared to what a contractor would cost you and we think that it is incredibly cool that those videos have gone viral and we have had so many people making videos posting on YouTube most of them really trying to do our process because this is so easy to do and there is so much of a beneficial gain that why would wouldn't you right another thing is is we have people from all over the globe that sent us emails and photos of the projects that they've done some of them in Aid dry climates some of them in extremely cold weather nasty conditions and they give us updates and I think that part is so cool they'll show us the project hey we did this project thank y'all so much we would never been able to get this accomplished due to financial reasons due to where we live geographically it's just not feasible to get a concrete truck in here and it's projects like this that just bring me back and make me so humbl by that and we're so thankful that we are able to share this process that took us years to perfect and be able to share it with everybody e

Channel: Cajun Country Livin'

Views: 1,467,562

Keywords: Cajun country Livin, Cajun country living, Dry pour, Dry pour concrete, Concrete, Sidewalk, Concrete sidewalk, How to, How to dry pour, How to build concrete sidewalk, Concrete foundation, DIY, DIY sidewalk, DIY concrete project, Money saving, On a budget, Dry pouring, How to build, YouTube series, Viral video, Subs, Subscrib, Youtub, Family channel, Helpful channel, Vlog, Springtime projects, Quikcrete, good simple living, Life uncontained, Wild wonderful offgrid, Homestead, Home

Id: ZUqyJ_Zs7l4

Length: 28min 0sec (1680 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024