Concrete work is finished!

Well, my concrete projects are finished for now!

I got the flagstone sidewalks cleaned up for the most part last night and the driveway is curing nicely.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the driveway. There is one small low spot about 2' long by 1' wide that collects a little bit of water when I'm spraying it down, but other than that it seems pretty good. The small puddle is only about 1/2" deep and the cement is 8" thick where the puddle is so I don't think it will cause any real problems. There are a few other low spots but none really hold much water, they are all less than 1/4" deep and the water evaporates off of them in less than 1/2 an hour.

The finish is good, but they told us to keep the dogs in the garage overnight so they wouldn't walk on the concrete as it dried and we did that, but there are a few cat tracks on the cement and something went across it a couple times and left some light scratches. I meant to take a picture of them but forgot. I think it might have been a rabbit as we've been having problems with them eating Cathy's tomato plants. I think they just add a little character to it, they aren't deep enough to actually be an issue at all.

Here's the final product.

I still need to clean up the area around it a little bit and level off the road leading up to it a little but that shouldn't take much time. We are continuing to water it down 3 times a day to help it cure slower and hopefully avoid any major cracking. Eventually I'll bring in some more dirt from elsewhere on the property and build up the ground around it to make it a little more level so there's not such a steep drop off away from the driveway.

One thing we did with the driveway to keep from having to build everything up around it even more was make some ramps up into the garage. It doesn't look like much but there is a 4 inch drop from the garage to the rest of the driveway over the first 3 feet coming out of the garage. This really helped in matching the driveway to the grade of the land around it and really shouldn't be any issue on getting in or out of the garage at all. Plus if we had a torrential downpour it would help keep rain water from running into the garage.

Here's a picture of the ramp before the forms were pulled off.Back to the sidewalks, that's where I spent my time and effort yesterday.

I mentioned in my previous post that it really wasn't a big deal to get cement on the flagstone since you can clean it off anyway. Well, there's a fine line (or wide line actually) between being overly careful and being downright sloppy and I think I crossed it! When it came time to clean the cement off the flagstone I realized that I should have worked a little bit harder when the cement was still wet to get the flagstone a little cleaner! It took alot more work than I expected to get the flagstone cleaned and there is still some cement left on some of it.

Here's what the sidewalk to the barn looked like yesterday when I got ready to start cleaning it. The sad thing is that it was in alot better shape than the sidewalk by the house! I had 2 gallons of muratic acid and I ended up using both of them. I mixed them at about a 50% mix ratio with water in a 5 gallon bucket and started scrubbing. (I mixed 2 separate batches, that kept the mix cleaner). One thing you should probably do when scrubbing a very basic material (cement) with an acid is wear good eye and skin protection. Of course I was out there in shorts and slip on shoes with no socks! I got stung a few times but the muratic acid really isn't that strong and the only place it hurt was when it splashed on an open sore where I had a scratch on my leg or something.

I washed everything down once with the acid then rinsed it all down then repeated the process. It really is kind of neat scrubbing it down as the acid foams up when it comes into contact with the cement like hydrogen peroxide does when you put it on a cut. The second time around it was easy to see where the worst of the cement was on the flagstone because it foamed up.

After an hour or so of scrubbing and a final rinse, here's what it looked like. I think it turned out pretty good overall. There are still a few spots with some cement on the flagstone but not too bad.

Here's what it looked like this morning after drying.

For some reason this cement ended up being a little lighter in color, but I think it helps the flagstone stand out better. I think it is because this cement was fibered cement and the last batch I worked with wasn't. I think over time it will get a little dark also.

Here's the sidewalk from the front porch to the back sidewalk this morning.

You can see it is a little rougher than the barn sidewalk with the cement, but partly the stones are just a lighter color and don't stand out as much. I'll probably wait until the end of the summer and scrub it down again one more time to see if I can get all the cement off.

I still have a little bit of cleanup to do and I'll probably bring in a little dirt with my tractor and fill in around the edges a little bit, but other than that I'm done.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the results of both projects. My list of things to do is getting shorter and shorter! Hopefully after this weekend the barn will be wired for electricity (lights, outlets, etc.) and that will be one more item off my list!

That's it for now. Nathan