I Built A Snow Melting Sidewalk In 4 Hours!

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it has been snowing here in brooklyn all week long and uh it's super cold and chilly here but i wanted to show you guys the first project that we did here in williamsburg about three years ago i've lived here in new york city for 30 years [Music] [Applause] for the first 18 years i lived in a really tall apartment building on the upper west side with a doorman who would announce guests and a maintenance staff that did chores like take out the garbage keep the sidewalks clean and in the wintertime shovel the snow it was a terrific perk of living in a really nice building back in 2010 my husband and i sold that apartment and we bought this 1881 townhouse in williamsburg brooklyn and overnight we had to become a different kind of a homeowner now it's up to us to take out the garbage sweep the sidewalk and plant the flowers along our street and we love it but every winter when it snows i gotta admit i missed that maintenance staff shoveling the sidewalk thankfully we've got a teenager in the house for another couple years anyway [Music] a week ago our quiet neighborhood suddenly became a construction zone brooklyn's public works department began digging up the sidewalks throughout our neighborhood to replace the old gas lines suddenly we realized we had a rare opportunity since the city was redoing the concrete sidewalks on our entire block we realized this was the perfect opportunity for us to put a concrete warming system in front of our house ripping out old sidewalk and pouring new concrete can be an enormous expense so by doing this project when the city's paying for it made the entire project much more affordable my main concern was that i didn't know when the city was going to be pouring the concrete and since it wasn't on my schedule how much time i'd have to put the mats in i went online to research which product was right for us and i found there were two main types of sidewalk and driveway heating electric mats or heated liquid in tubes i decided on the electric mats because they're much easier to design less expensive to purchase and most important for me way easier to install i chose the warm-up snow melding system because i really liked how easy it was to figure out a design for our sidewalk and that we could have their product in days and i especially liked that the company had their own research and development team at their offices in germany and it didn't hurt that the quote from warm-up was one of the lowest we received here's how we started first i measured the sidewalk in front of our house to determine where we wanted the snow melting to happen and i drew a diagram of it then on the warmup.com website i uploaded my diagram and within 24 hours one of their technicians had designed the system for us they gave us a list of warm-up items we'd need for the project and a total cost for the entire job they even suggested ways to reduce our cost and increase the snow melting area by simply changing from their three foot wide mats to the two foot ones and i like that [Music] three days later our snow melting mats arrived [Music] the only other item i needed to purchase was a roll of rebar to zip the warm up to so that it would stay in place when the concrete is poured over it [Music] then i just had to wait around for the city workers to get around to ripping up our streets this morning i woke to the sound of jackhammers tearing up the sidewalk on my street and the race to put in the warm-up begins i don't know how i slept through it but by 8 30 the workers had already ripped up the entire sidewalk up to my neighbor mrs romano's house and are ready to pour we got two hours i gotta get my electrician here i get my electrician's voicemail and text him but i know i can't wait [Music] so i go online and i begin calling random brooklyn electricians [Music] after 15 calls i struck gold he's available only two miles away and he'll head over now okay i've got some work to do out front i first put the rebar in place and then start rolling out the warm-up mats i need to make sure they're in the exact position as on the diagram then i start zip tying them down so they won't move when the concrete starts pouring it takes me about 20 minutes to lay out and tie down just one mat and i've got three of them so within an hour i'm just about ready for my electrician when he arrives he quickly connects the three mats to one junction box and then runs one line through a conduit up to the house where the sensor will be then just as he's finishing the workers begin pouring concrete over our warm-up vans we just made it [Music] in just under four hours these workers have ripped up hundreds of feet of sidewalk along our entire block and are just about finished pouring our new cement [Music] by noon my sidewalk looked just like any other sidewalk on the block except ours has a hidden feature just a few inches below the surface that will reveal itself in a few months when that first brooklyn snowstorm comes roaring into town [Music] we went five months with no snow and then it hit in march just one week before the start of spring [Music] the forecast was huge a massive blizzard was heading for the east coast but over at our house a small blinking green light meant our sidewalk was ready for the snow since this is our first chance to actually see it work shawn and i stay up late and wait until the snow starts to pile up and then we go take a look check it out oh my god oh my god you can just see it at this very moment the change there's that's up the sidewalk the neighbor's house and there's our little melted area oh my gosh look how snake that mine is look at that it's working this is just above freezing the sensor is heating up this entire pad starting look right there and this its job is to raise it just above freezing maybe like 40 degrees and it'll stay on automatically for eight hours we're supposed to get a foot of snow 18 inches of snow who knows but not at our house as the sun comes out i venture outside to see the extent of the blizzard and our neighbors digging out in the freezing cold but as i look at the sidewalk in front of our house let's say i have a very warm feeling [Music] it took a lot of planning and a few stressful hours but it was so worth it and for once our heavy old shovel sits unused by the front door yeah there's warm up out here but this driveway doesn't shovel itself [Music] it's really important that you subscribe

Channel: Back To The Studs

Views: 109,677

Keywords: #DYI, #NY #townhouse, #SATC, #TVproducer, #adoption, #australianamerican, #backtothestuds #gaydads, #broadway, #broadwayactor, #brooklyn, #centerstage, #concrete, #dancer, #design, #gaycouple, #gaymen, #gayparents, #gayrenovation, #husbands, #lgbt, #longIsland, #neighborhood, #realityshow, #reno, #renovation, #sidewalk, #snow, #snowmelt, #warmup, #williamsburg, #williamsburgbrooklyn #newyorkcity, broadway, heated driveway, lgbt, musical, nyc, theater, theatre, townhouse

Id: zVqfDUWBbU0

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021