How To Resurface A Badly Damaged Concrete Walkway

hey guys mike here so in this video i'm going to show you how we resurface a really badly damaged concrete sidewalk so the homeowner on this one didn't want to replace the concrete didn't want to jack hammer it out and pour new just wanted to resurface it for now and then maybe later on you know down the road do that but she wanted to figure out what she could do to fix this and make it look a little bit better so i told her we could resurface it and that's what we're going to do here now we had to survey the concrete just to see if it was even fixable and you know we determined that with some some repair and using the right products that we could fix this and make it look really good and that's what we're gonna do you'll see at the end just how good this thing came out so the first thing we're gonna do is just remove all the all the bad concrete on the surface and one of the ways we do that is by lightly grinding it so i got my my little bosch four inch grinder with a diamond diamond uh disk on it we got it hooked up to my my hepa vacuum so we don't worry too much about the dust and luke is just going over the surface and removing any of the loose concrete that's just not really obvious and then when he gets into the worst areas the more spalled areas you know that thing will really uh remove the loose concrete get it down to some good solid concrete something that we can repair because we can't really repair over anything that's that's loose or coming loose or falling off so the first thing you got to do is just get rid of all that stuff and get it down to something solid that's work that you can work with and the easiest way we found to do that is just with a little grinder like that you know it's it's pretty easy to use you can get a grinder you could use a dewalt you could use a metabo you could use you know anything you can get your hands on but you know the key is you can see now he's getting into an area where he just wants to check and see if there's some really loose chunks that he needs to take off before he grinds over him he'll just take a hammer and lightly tap him off and get rid of him and then he'll grind right over that to remove them but you could get a you could get a grinder like that at home depot or lowe's you know it could be a dewalt and they have the shrouds there you can hook up to a vacuum so and you could just use a regular shop vac you know if this if it's just something you're going to do once or twice or something though you know we do this a lot so we get some pretty good pretty good tools that we use so luke's going to just finishing up grind grinding that whole surface and then we can move on to the repairs and we always like to do our repairs prior to the resurfacing and get the surface you know at least looking pretty decent pretty smooth before we use the resurfacing material so it's it's a little bit of a process you know and the first process part of it that's always evaluating to see if it's even repairable this one is borderline and then the second is is doing the prep the prep is really what makes the final outcome looked the best you know if you spend a lot of time on the prep and making sure you get that done right then really you know that makes the resurfacing part probably the easiest part of the whole project we we did this we did that this all in a day so we're going to use some really fast drying resurfacing material and there's all kinds of different resurfacers out there you can use i'll show you what we're going to use here a little bit later on but if you know if you're under the gun for time if uh if you need to get something done fast then you can use the same products we do you know because we we do concrete work every single day we have we have tons of jobs lined up sometimes we got to get in and out in a day so we can move on to the next job and that's that's a lot of what our schedule is all about so we we don't want to hurry things and just to get it done we want to make sure we do a really good job and do something that's going to last but we've got to use products that'll help us speed up our timeline sometimes too and i'm going to show you guys just what we use here to do that luke's getting that last piece finished up and then we'll evaluate this again and see if there's any further grinding or chipping or hammering we got to do to remove any other pieces before we move on to the next step so this is part of the next step here so i'm gonna i'm gonna rinse this off and it does it does a couple things for me you know rinsing it will remove some of the dust some of the loose particles that were left behind that the vacuum didn't pick up and then it's also going to wet the concrete out too you know when we when we resurface or make repairs most of the time we do that the products we use want a a damp surface not wet or no you know no standing water or puddles but just something damp it's called ssd surface saturated dry in the in the repair world that way the existing concrete doesn't suck the moisture right out of the repair too fast you know if it's if the concrete's damp and moist then your repair is going to bond a little bit better so we'll remove all the dust all the debris get it the surface nice and damp we'll remove any little puddles in those deeper areas you don't want any standing water so that's what we're doing right now it's taking a little dewalt blower there battery blower and all these tools you guys all these tools will be down in the description if you want to check them out but that'll that right there will remove any of the standing water in the deeper areas and get rid of that for us before we start doing the repairs [Applause] the repair material we use is gonna is gonna really fix all those falls and chips and divots and pop outs it's going to fix all that stuff but it's then it's going to look like a big patched area so you don't really want to just leave it like that [Applause] the repair material we're using also is very fine so it kind of feathers out it feathers out to almost nothing you know it goes from it goes from zero to a half an inch pretty easily so what i'm using for the repair material is that you can see that blue bag behind me it's called cement it's from rapid set that stuff dries really really fast but it it also dries and repairs concrete like this really nice now they do make a little tiny pack of what's called set retarder and it slows the setting time down and we are using a little bit of that today so that comes in a little package and you buy it right at the store that sells the the repair material here you know i know home depot sells this stuff so one of those little packs in a bag like that will give you a little bit more working time on something like this otherwise if you don't use that pack you're you're only going to have two to three maybe four or five minutes depending on the temperature of working time with this and then if you put that pack in it'll at least double that for you so you'll have some more work time you don't want to set up too fast on you and waste it so this is about the consistency about like pancake batter we like to mix it too when we're doing repairs and we'll just pour it right in there like like luke's doing right now and then once he gets that poured in there you can see i got a hand trowel there i've also got like a drywall like a drywall kind of trowel and i'm gonna i'm just gonna move that stuff around and start doing the repairs and and filling in all the low spots and any of the bad spots we're gonna fill it right in this stuff moves around really nice what i don't want to do is i just i don't want to get the repair material too low in the repaired area you know we don't have to go over it again if anything i want to leave it just a tiny bit high if i have to i could always i could always re-grind it really lightly if it's too high you know i'm pretty used to doing this so i'm going to get it troweled really close if not perfect because i've done it so much but if if this is the first time you're doing it you know definitely don't leave the stuff low leave it a tiny bit high and then once it dries you could always go back over it again with a grinder real quick if you need to if you need to lower it just a little bit if you feel like there's a little hump in there you can see how nice that stuff kind of kind of trowels out and you're just going to fill in all those little low areas you're not gonna you know don't try to be too perfect with it get it close and like i said then move on and uh don't mix the whole bag at one time either you can see we we've probably only mixed half the bag at once and we're really experienced so half a bag at a time is enough so we got the worst of it first and now we're going around and doing all the smaller areas and there'll be two of us once we get it dumped out kind of trialling this stuff around and it all the little areas filled in if it's just you yourself you know you can even mix a little bit smaller batches and do little bits and pieces at a time take your time you can see how we're forcing it down into those bad areas getting it all smoothed out now it's starting to look like something that's repairable this concrete was was about 30 years old so it's been there for a while and it gets it gets salted quite a bit in the winter so it has a lot of freezing and thawing cycles and that's a big part of what led to all that damage you can see how luke and i are going around making sure we want to make sure you know 99 of it is the bad airs you know are fixed before we go over it with the resurfacing the resurfacing material will fill in some of the really smaller areas but it just looks a lot better if you get all the bad areas filled in first now this stuff you can see i'm even rubbing some of it into small hairline cracks with my fingers there just to get it really pushed down into them but this stuff's going to dry in about in about 30 minutes this stuff's going to be rock hard so you'll be able to move right on to the next step if you want to if not you can leave it until the next day too come back and do it the next day that'll be just fine but we know that by repairing all the little the little chipped areas the divots the little cracks that the end products gonna end up looking a lot better so what i'm doing now is i'm just taking a little brush and i'm even feathering out feathering it out a little bit more and giving the patch a little bit of texture too and that's what that brush is going to do is on those edges of those patches it's really going to fill in really nice and smooth that right out that cement all it dries really fast so you know this is all done in just a matter of minutes here so now what we're doing you know we've given this about 30 or 40 minutes and luke's just going over it with a rubbing stone and taking off any little high areas you can see how that stuff dried up kind of like white almost so he's gonna buzz off any of the any of the trial marks or burrs or anything that's a little bit rough that we don't want showing through in the finished material he'll just he'll just lightly go over it and that only takes a couple minutes to go over something like this you don't have to spend a ton of time on it if you did a pretty good job trial on it so now what i'm doing is i'm i'm wetting the surface again to get the concrete damp and i'm also rinsing off any of the little dust that luke made with that rubbing stone so i'm cleaning it also want the surface damp again before we go over with the resurfacing material so we'll just soak it down really good and again that's going to keep the resurfacing material from drying out too fast it'll also make the resurfacing material kind of kind of lay out on the surface a little bit it'll be easier to trowel on the surface if you try to trowel on a resurfacer on something that's dry concrete it's it's going to go on really tough it's not going to spread out that nicely now luke's just again removing any standing water any puddles it's just we just want the surface damp some of that water is going to soak into that concrete so so here we are we're using again rapid set product and we're using the mortar mix and the mortar mix compared to that blue bag the mortar mix has a little bit more aggregate in it like like fine sand in it so it's going to leave a little bit more of a texture when we're done and that's what we wanted we wanted to make sure this wasn't going to be slippery at all when we were done and we wanted it to have a little more texture now we could have used the blue bag too to resurface this is just the the surface would have had a little bit finer texture to it and that's that's fine if that's what you want and again we're using the the set retarder packet also we put that in we we actually mixed that in the water before we dumped in the the mortar mix so here's here's the process you know you get it mixed you get some out on the surface again the concrete under me is damp and we just get it spread around with a with a trowel and i just want to cover the surface and you know i don't want to put it on too thick i might i maybe leave on you know a 16th to an eighth of an inch as i go and some of the sand particles in the mortar mix itself is going to help leave that amount on you're not going to be able to trowel it like right down to nothing that's another reason we use this product today because we wanted to make sure we had a good um not really a thick surface but surface that was a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch and you see those like chatter marks i'm leaving with the trial you don't have to worry about that you don't have to worry about getting this perfect because we're going to run a broom over the surface so that broom is going to take out all those chatter marks all you need to do is just get it spread out make sure you're you're forcing the material down into the pores of the concrete and just covering everything up getting the whole surface covered with a fairly even coat of the product you just want to be steady working with this thing you know you don't want to you don't want to stop and answer your phone or stop and and take off and go somewhere for a few minutes because again this stuff is a rapid set product so it is going to just dry up on you pretty quick if you don't just keep moving with it you're gonna have about you know if you mix the whole thing at once like we did you're gonna have about 10 to 15 minutes of working time if you use that set retire and if you don't use the set retarder you only have about four or five minutes of working time and you know we know by using this stuff all the time that we're fast enough to get this down in 10 to 15 minutes on something like this and and this really isn't that big so if so if you're doing something bigger you want to do it in sections you can see how that broom really really evens things out makes makes the surface look really nice you'd never even know this concrete was damaged that badly if you hadn't seen it before see how that broom is kind of pulling back the excess so all you need to do with that trowel is just get it trialed down fairly evenly and the broom is going to do the rest you can see luke's just touching up that edge we wanted to make sure we didn't get any material on the existing uh pool patio and i'm just going to keep working my way down the walkway you see i'm going back and forth back and forth just making sure i'm pushing it into the existing concrete pores getting it forced down in there and that's going to help create a really good bond one thing about the mortar mix it has a little bit more of a brown text brown kind of kind of look to it than the blue bag does the blue bag has more of a whitish finish to it when it dries so that might that might play into what you use for a product too if you're you want something a little bit more on the wider side or something more on the browner side i guess it would depend on what bag you chose we're going to end up doing something special to the surface of this when we're done so i'll i'll tell you about that right at the end so you can check that out after you could definitely just leave the surface like this with this product you just put a just put a regular acrylic concrete sealer over this this it would be fine that way but we're going to do something a little bit more than that a little bit different the tail that concrete behind me it's still damp you know if it starts to dry out on you just keep lightly wetting it behind you and make sure the concrete stays damp behind you this stuff's going to trial on a lot easier it's a little bit of a process you can see how long it's taken me to get down there making sure that everything's spread out really nice i don't really want to run it over the edge too much and make a mess so i'm just taking my time now if i was by myself i'd be hustling a little bit faster than this but luckily i got you know luke to run the broom and darren's behind me he's doing the mixing and making sure i got enough product making sure the concrete stays damp behind me yeah that broom really takes out all the imperfections luke's kinda after he after he gets a section broomed he's kind of cleaning off the broom too a little bit just to make sure the the resurfacer doesn't get built up in the bristles of the broom that way all the texture looks the same from start to finish there i'm getting down towards the end now i'm going to work my way right out that gate that goes out to the driveway luke's gonna come over here and just finish brooming that section for me and then i can finish up that last piece then at the end here i'm gonna i'm gonna show you what we did to finish this thing off yeah so only put as much on as you think you'll need you know you don't want to you don't want to have to be scraping this off and putting it back in the bucket if you don't need to that especially if you're working next to a driveway like we are that could make a little bit of a mess so just a little bit of time a little bit goes a long way with this stuff we only really ended up using about half of that bucket which was a full bag so we used about half the bag to do this entire walkway a bag of that stuff at home depot is about 15 you know it's between 15 and 20 bucks so it's it's not all that expensive same with the blue bag we use it's around 20 bucks for a bag of that blue stuff so you know we got about 40 bucks in material right here that we used to resurface this everything else was just time and labor so it's a pretty inexpensive material to use to resurface and again if if you remember this is what it looked like to start with it was in pretty rough shape there was a lot of deep spalling some really bad areas and this is what it looks like when we're done brand new concrete so let me know down in the comments if you like this if you think this is something you can do and this is what we did at the end so we painted this and this is the video you want to go watch to see what we use for paint and how we painted it we use the exact same color guys so thanks for watching i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Mike Day Concrete

Views: 429,863

Rating: 4.8924208 out of 5

Keywords: how to resurface concrete, resurface concrete patio, resurfacing concrete, resurface concrete driveway, repair concrete driveway, how to repair concrete, how to concrete, concrete, diy concrete, how to pour concrete, how to form concrete, concrete finishing techniques, concrete skills, concrete floor, stamped concrete, how to, concrete tools, how to pour a concrete slab, how to pour a concrete floor, how to pour a concrete driveway, pouring concrete, finishing concrete

Id: YLvfk4ho3E0

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020