The ULTIMATE Concrete Landscape Edging (DIY Concrete Garden Curb)

when I bought this Fixer-Upper the garden in the front of the house left a lot to be desired so in this video I'm going to show you how I built this concrete Garden curb taking us from that sad original situation to this this video is going to cover every step of the project from planning your layout to prepping the site to building the concrete forms and finally the fun part which is pouring and finishing the concrete so if you want to build something similar to this let's get into the video so as you can see this project starts with the front of the house looking pretty pitiful so the whole idea is we're going to add this concrete Garden curve as shown in green so now that we know that we're putting this concrete Garden curb in kind of the L formation let's move on to step one which is basically preparing the area for the concrete curb I got started by removing all of the loose mulch and topsoil from the area and then I started putting all of it in the back of my truck to take to the dump before Excavating any further I wanted to establish how far the concrete curb was going to be offset from the house I chose 72 inches and I made that Mark on one side and then did that on the other side of the curb as well I was originally going to mark that line with a string line but I decided since I was going to be Excavating that using just some spray paint to Mark both sides of the curb was going to be easier because I could see exactly where I needed to actually dig out now when I talk about Excavating or digging out I'm talking about the four inches I want to dig out for the gravel sub base which I almost always put underneath concrete since one it's easy to actually Compact and two it helps with drainage so I'm Excavating down to allow for four inches of gravel sub base so I continued the excavation around the corner there and then I raked everything so that it was roughly uniform and level okay so at this point in the project we've excavated down approximately eight inches below the top of the curb we're going to be pouring later on so now that we got it excavated we'll get rid of any of the loose soil and then we're going to go ahead and compact it with a hand Tamp so here I am just removing any loose dirt and debris that might be in our excavated area then I'm compacting the soil using a hand Tamp and this compaction is just going to minimize the amount of settling that the concrete Garden curb does over time now with the soil compacted it's time to pick up the crushed stone which we're going to use as our gravel sub base I get my gravel from a local Quarry but you can pick up bags of gravel at Home Depot now before adding the stone to the excavated area when I use a string line to basically establish four inches so the first four inches is going to be filled up with the gravel sub base and the four inches on top is going to be our concrete curb but I'm going to put this String Line in just so when I actually backfill with stone I have a reference line for how much Stone I need to hit that forward so this is definitely a bit Overkill but I'm basically going to put a stake in the ground that I'm going to establish a level line that's going to be four to five inches above the compacted dirt that way when I'm actually back filling I know exactly how much Stone I need to add across the entire length so I set it once but I'll say it again this is probably Overkill you basically just need to make sure that you have around four to six inches of gravel sub base that you can compact it well and so that you have drainage underneath your concrete Garden curb also I wanted to eliminate the possibility of weeds growing up in between the garden curb and the garden we're going to be installing later so I put down this geotextile fabric so that when I backfill the rest of the stone it's going to hold it in place and hopefully there's not going to be a seam where weeds can come up between the curb and the garden after getting the geotextile and the stone in place it's time to compact the stone just like we did for the soil now the last step before we can pour concrete is to build the concrete forms and the concrete forms are going to be made out of two by four and two by six Lumber and they're basically going to be positioned side by side so that we have concrete that will go in between and the forms are going to form the walls for that concrete to set up all right so now that we got four inches of stone in and we're relatively level what I'm going to do is install one of these expansion gaps before I put in the new curb right here the idea is when a concrete curb expands and contracts it's going to be able to do so against something that's a little bit malleable and flexible as opposed to something rigid which could cause crack so I'm going to go ahead and probably just snap this right now and then I'll trim it to size later on this is going to go between the curb right here and this slab so after getting that expansion joint in place we're going to take our first piece of lumber and we're going to make sure that we have a uniform distance from the house around 72 inches then we're going to use the stake to hold it in place you want to make sure it's slightly below so that when you actually run your screed across your Stakes aren't going to get in the way after putting the stake in use a six foot level the longer the better to make sure that your form board is perfectly level all the way across and you may need to add or remove some Stone to get it perfectly level but take your time and make sure you get it right and because our concrete Garden curb is going to be six inches wide I'm basically going to cut a few pieces of six inch blocking that way I'm able just to insert those between the two parallel pieces of board and that's going to make it really easy to make sure that I keep a uniform six inch Gap or the entire length of the concrete curb after getting the first two pieces of concrete form in place so that they're nice and parallel six inches apart I went and installed the next piece and I made sure it was perfectly flush with the piece I installed previously with a hammer and once I got it completely flush I installed some blocking to hold the two pieces together after checking level I measure the perpendicular piece of concrete form and then I cut that to size using a circular saw then I positioned it in place again using an expansion joint by the house before sticking it in place and then securing the two boards together after confirming that they're perfectly perpendicular and square using a framing square then I simply assembled the rest of the concrete form on the inside there using a six inch piece of blocking to maintain a six inch spacing between the two and then screwing everything together and checking level and installing bracing along the way and at this point the concrete forms are fully assembled and we can start pouring the concrete so at this point it's time to actually purchase our concrete and for this project I'm going to be using rapid sets 24 6 concrete mix I've used this product for both my sidewalk and also my concrete Landing so I like the product I know how it works and it sets up within you know 10 hours so I like the fact that it cures quickly if you're dealing with a smaller project you can maybe get away with using something like mortar mix or cemental because that cures within like an hour but if you're dealing with the larger project and I'm not in a hurry I'm just going to use 24 6 and to figure out how much of the concrete I needed I used rapid sets concrete calculator tool I'll link it down below but basically just enter the thickness the width the length and it's going to spit out how many bags of concrete you're going to need for your project and the last thing before we pour concrete is I want to Mark the control joints every four feet so real quick what I'm doing is I'm marking the control joint location every four feet so you can see I have another one right there and then four feet from there I have another one and then using this level that's four foot long that's going to mark all of my control joints along this concrete curb I'm going to be using the mud mixer to mix the 24 6 concrete for this project but you could also just use a wheelbarrow and a shovel I have a video showing five ways to mix concrete which I'll link above but to use the Mud Mixer you're going to load the dry concrete into the top Hopper and you're gonna hook up a garden hose and adjust the amount of water coming out of these hoses that water is going to mix with the concrete in the auger giving you a perfectly mixed concrete mix coming out the end and at this point we are rocking and rolling and we're basically just going to continue to add bags of concrete and move the Mud Mixer down the entire length of the garden curb I recommend that you use a flat board or a concrete finishing trowel to kind of screed the surface smooth it's very helpful to have two people working one who can operate the Mud Mixer and move it down and the other one to go back and Screen the top surface so shout out to my brother for helping out with that and then you can use a reciprocating saw without the blade to vibrate the forms this is going to help to eliminate air pockets and voids and just give you a better finish along that face of the form and once we got about three quarters of the way done my brother continued to add concrete to the forms while I went back and I screeded the surface flat and started the finishing process after giving the concrete a few minutes to set up I used an edging trowel along the Inside Edge and that's going to give us that professional looking rounded surface that you see on most concrete projects and don't worry if it looks messy now we're going to clean up everything with the finishing travel in just a second so after finishing up with the edging trowel I took my finishing travel and I started to smooth out the surface to give us that semi-professional looking finish Meanwhile my brother was just finishing up rounding out that corner so after he filled the rest of the form area with concrete I went back let the concrete set up a little bit and then I completed the finishing around the corner remember that concrete finishing is an art and it's often trickier than it looks and after rounding over the edges and finishing the face of the concrete I added control joints every four foot on Center using a grooving travel and the purpose of these control joints is they basically create an intentional weak point in the concrete Garden curb so when it inevitably cracks it'll crack within that joint and out on the face of the garden curve so to create the control joint push the grooving travel into the concrete to create a recess and then go back and clean up any of the rough edges using a finishing travel and an edging trowel just make sure that the Finish is nice and clean and at this point we finished the concrete and we're just going to give it 24 hours to cure overnight so it's the next day I went and removed all the stakes and started prying the concrete forms away from the concrete using a pry bar and a hammer here I almost lost a life and after prying the rest of the formboards away from the concrete I did a little bit of landscaping added some mulch planted a little bit of grass seed and this project is nearly complete let's take a quick reminder look of where this project started and here's a look at the final result foreign [Music] thank you guys so much for watching if you enjoyed the video drop a like down below subscribe to the channel for more DIY content and if you want to see how I built the other concrete projects you can check them out down below

Channel: Andrew Thron Improvements

Views: 701,139

Keywords: Concrete Landscape Edging, Concrete garden curb, DIY, concrete edging, concrete curb, garden curb, garden edging, DIY garden edging, best garden edging, DIY concrete garden edging, landscape edging, DIY landscape edging, How to build a concrete garden curb, garden curb concrete, concrete landscape edging, diy landscape edging, how to, do it yourself, concrete garden curb, landscape curb, landscape garden curb, DIY landscape perimeter, landscape edge, garden edge

Id: tcl2k9TkT-w

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023