Welcome to DIY for Homeowners. We're mother-daughter projects. I'm Steph. I'm
Vicki. And we're here outside mom's house. And today we're goning to show you how to
make a small concrete repair using a rotary hammer and some concrete. Let's
get started. This side of mom's driveway was damaged when a small tree fell on it.
It's not a major issue but we thought it would be a great place to try out making
a concrete repair. To remove the old concrete we're using a Bosch concrete
rotary hammer with Bosch chisel. This setup works great for small concrete
projects or to remove some old tile. This was actually a lot of fun and mom even
got into the action! Once we broke apart most of the top layer we removed the
pieces and moved on to creating a form to contain the concrete. This is a scrap
piece of wood that I'm going to cut to size using our new Ridgid circular saw.
I place the wood and added some stakes to hold it in place. For this repair
we're going to use Rapid Set Cement All which sets up in 15 minutes and gains
structural strength in 1 hour. Following the instructions, we're using 1 part
water to 3 part cement. I'm using a paddle mixer to quickly mix the concrete
as it sets up quickly so I want to work fast! We also added a little bit more
cement as it looked a little too watery. And I'm sorry we weren't able to get a
view inside of the bucket because, again, we had to work fast.
Mom wet the area that we're about to put the cement in. And we had no idea, but
we actually mixed up just the right amount of cement for this repair. And
sadly I didn't realize I was actually pouring some of this cement outside of
the repair spot, so oh well, I guess I'll learn for next time! Mom's knock ing the
side a bit to release the trapped air bubbles and here she's smoothing the top
with a trowel. To retain moisture in the concrete while it cures we place plastic
on top but we didn't realize that the plastic was actually touching the
concrete and that actually left an impression which we don't love on the
concrete, but again, we've learned for next time. An hour later we took the
plastic off and here is where you can see the impression that the plastic left.
The form came up easily and the edge looks really good. What we learned. When
we decided to do this project I did some research online to see how to do it and
we couldn't find a lot of great tutorials on it, but most of them said
all you need to do to break up the original concrete is to use a hammer and
chisel! Well, we did not try that because we
knew that was going take us way too long. Even if we, if we could even do that with
our strength level but the rotary hammer really came in handy and worked well for
us. If we were to do a bigger patch you probably would rent a jackhammer to do
that. Well, when we poured the concrete we had a
little surprise moment. We didn't realize the driveway was as sloped as it is. Part
of the reason why it's it's sloped and uneven is that part of the concrete is
started to come up and it's gotten uneven. If we'd realize that, we would have
ground down that edge prior to pouring the concrete. Now if you have a
suggestion or an idea how you deal with this uneven concrete just let us know in
the comments below. In the project you saw we used the Rapid Set Cement Alll to
make this repair. We have used that product before for making cool little projects
but never for a repair. Well we found it was a great option for this type of
repair because it cures really quickly.
We don't have to wait 24 hours to cure like typical concrete and wait 28 days for it
to fully get full strength. So this was a great idea. I'm glad we thought about it.
We had some on hand so it was great for that. We also read on the website that
using cold iced water would help slow down the curing process and also help
with the heat when it's hot outside and we're in Florida so that was a good idea
and it worked well. Now the end result is not as pretty as I would like. We had a
little bit of spill over but you know this is our first time to try a concrete
repair and we basically wanted to challenge ourselves to see if we could
do it and we were successful and I feel like we could, with a few tweaks, we could
do a larger area. Now I might, at a later time, go out here, come back out here with
a wire wheel and clean up some of that over spill, clean up some of the concrete deck got on
the driveway. if you like this project and want to see more from us please
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