The concrete path

Ever since moving into my house there have been a few projects that have always been on my 'someday' list.  Someday I'll build a dumbwaiter from the kitchen to the downstairs family room.  Someday I'll remodel the downstairs bathroom to have a huge walk-in shower.  Someday I'll convert Liam's room and the big nursury below him into one giant cavernous room with lofts and bridges and tree house style bunks.

Someday.

Well, this summer I did one of those someday projects.  Yes, it was not as ambitious as a few of my pet projects, but I felt it was definitely doable.

All around my house is either concrete or wooden deck except on the south side where there is nothing but some red brick stepping stones and a bunch of beauty bark or rocks.  This made it impossible to walk all the way around the house in socks or bare feet without stepping on small round river rock which is more painful than you'd think, or carefully stepping on red brick stones without touching the beauty bark, lest ye get splinters.

So, after some pondering on what I want to see on the side of my house, I got to work.  I find it's best to just start ripping stuff up so that I am forced to deal with the mess.  So I moved the garbage and yardwaste bin and started shoveling beauty bark into my wheel barrow and spreading it elsewhere in my yard.

Alien infestation?

I discovered that the previous owner had put landscape fabric down over the top of some nice crushed rock. This would make things easier I thought, since my plan is to lay some concrete down as a walkway. Now I have some nice 'native' crushed rock as a base.  I also discovered an evil tentacled creature residing under the landscape fabric...

I removed about a dozen or so wheel barrow loads of beauty bark and re-purposed it in several well deserving areas of the yard, which was an added benefit to my project, as now my yard looked better too!

I wasn't sure at the beginning what this would end up looking like, but I kept on digging and as I finished the first section I figured what they heck, and expanded into the second half of the area.  May as well do the whole job all at once!

It was a lot of work moving all the beauty bark and then moving all the little round river rock out of the way, but once it was gone I was able to see more clearly what I wanted to do.  I picked up some ceder bender board from Lowe's and made some stakes to form it around the area where I would pour concrete.  It was really starting to take shape and I could see what the end product would probably look like now.

High fashion yard work

 The plan is to have a flat surface for the garbage cans and recycle bin, while also having enough room to walk past them and roll them out.  Then the pathway would continue on down toward the back yard.  Straight paths are for suckers though, so I had it curve away from the house before going back in toward it. It ended up with a nice little patio at the back of the house, a curved walkway up connecting to a nice long patio up at the front of the house.  Even Gennie started to get excited about the project once she could see what I was trying to describe. She even helped sweep out the form area, though she didn't stop to put her Gucci bag down first...

Fence posts, Comcast, downspouts
Oh my!

There were of course some glitches to the plan.  For example, there is a downspout right by the garage that empties into a buried 4" corrugated pipe that leads off to somewhere off the property.  This became a nuisance because I ended up digging it up for about 10 feet in order to re-position it around the fence posts that I wanted to put in to hold the gate I intend to build.  It was also completely full of roofing sand from run-off.  I put my hose on full blast and snaked it about twenty feet into the pipe to run that on down the line.  I'm sure I probably just made the problem worse, but I let it run for 10 minutes or so, so if it is worse, at least it should be somewhere where I can't fix it now.

Next to the post and downspout is also where the Comcast cable comes up to the house.  It was just buried a foot down or so and came up at only a slight angle, making it a rather annoying fixture to deal with.  My neighbor suggested I bend the pipe it was in, which was just plastic.  He offered a heat gun, and with that I was able to make the pipe flexible enough to bend it so that it was pointing more or less straight up.

I measured off the whole area to get an idea of how many yards of concrete to order.  Using AutoCAD I was able to figure out that I had 265 square feet of patio and walkway, and thus needed about 3.5 yards of concrete.  Yikes!  Suddenly I was feeling I may have a problem.  Indeed at first I thought I'd be able to simply mix the concrete from bags, using Gigi's concrete mixer.  A quick calculation shows that I would need to mix 150 something 80 pound bags of concrete!  YIKES!!  Yes, it would be cheaper to mix my own, but something told me that I'd never be able to mix it all before it started to get hard, let alone make it look smooth.  I think that was common sense kicking in.

So instead, I ordered a concrete truck to come out and deliver 3.5 yards of concrete.  It's only $100 a yard plus a $150 delivery fee, so I'm thinking I can get this whole thing layed for about $500 bucks.

Common sense kicks in again.  I'd have to wheelbarrow 3.5 yards of concrete 30 to 60 feet.  They only stay for about a half hour before they start charging you over time.  Hmmm... additional $75 per half hour... I figure it would take me 2 hours to wheelbarrow that much concrete, given that I'd be really exhausted after the first 20 minutes.

So instead, I ordered up not just a concrete truck, but also a concrete pump truck!  Yay!  Only $350 more!  Ok, not so Yay!  My cost has now gone from a few hundred bucks to over $900!  YUCK!  It's too late to stop now though, I'm committed.

Bestway Concrete truck

Gennie lays the hose out

The concrete man pours the
concrete for us!  Thank you!

Troweling a nice
smooth surface

Now comes the hard part... letting it dry without walking on it too much.  After putting a broom finish on it for traction, we stay off of it for three days and more, even up to a week before rolling the garbage cans back onto it.

The good news is, it looks great now!  I can walk all the way around the house and not worry too much about splinters and slivers with bare feet.  I have since built the gate so that not only are the garbage cans well out of sight, but also little Eric and Henry can't escape from the backyard via the garage side.  I'll have to deal with the other side of the house to fully enclose the backyard though.

The bad news is, even though I accounted for sloping away from the house, not enough concrete was poured near the garage so the slab is nearly perfectly level... which is not desirable.  It was supposed to slope away, so now I get standing water right between the two fence posts.  DOH!

I also had to add a little side drain area down by the deck end of the patio to accommodate water runoff.  When the water didn't have anywhere to go, it wasn't draining off the patio fast enough and pooling.  I added this little run-off channel and now the water moves off the patio pretty freely.  Note the little drain at the end, it actually just drains into that which leads to a pipe that drains far enough under the deck that the water flows away from the house.

All in all I'm pleased with the out come.  It cost a lot more than I anticipated, but for the size of the project, and how it turned out, I'm still quite happy with the results and am in way cheaper than if I'd have hired the whole project done.

Concrete poured 7/8/2014

Brought to you by the Amos School of Construction.