My Concrete Driveway Repair Saga, Part Deux - The Canyon Petite

As I am somewhat testosterone challenged and I'm not keen on abusing steroids, there are times that having someone around of the Y chromosome/testosterone persuasion can facilitate the progress of the GSD list.

In truth, I can do most of these things myself, one small bite of the GSD elephant at a time. Yes, there's merit to that. However,  there are several things on my GSD list that can be significantly hastened to completion by just adding testosterone to the mix.  Breaking up concrete is one of them.  In this bite of elephant, 10 minutes of manly man bashing to break stuff up beats my 2 hours chiseling hands down. To wit, creation of a small canyon in the concrete stands at about 90% done after said man did some bashing for me.  Woo Hoo!

So, these photos are the first stage of concrete driveway repair, BT (before testosterone.

Photos of the second stage of concrete driveway repair, AT (after testosterone) will be added later today.




Now time to go fine a concrete calculator.  Here's one!
www.concretenetwork.com/concrete/howmuch/calculator.htm

concrete driveway repair instructions
driveway crack repair

I am DESRUCTOR WOMAN

Have a court hearing with my soon (but not soon enough) abusive ex-husband tomorrow.

Reading all the documents, paperwork, email to prep for this hearing has me just. plain. pissed.

The brain weasels are doing a tango in my cerebral cortex, uninvited.  What does this have to do with my GSD list, you may be asking?

Well, it's a great motivator to smash up driveway concrete... so far, so good.

Bastard.

The Bathroom Tile Madness - Part 1.

The "master bathroom" in this house is small. By small, I mean 6' x 8' and that includes the bathtub, vanity and toilet footprints. Tile floor, tile up the walls about 3/4 of the way.  Fixtures are the originals in robin's egg blue which I kind of like). Tile floor is blue, dove grey and white 1" x 1.5" tiles... original grout was darker dove grey. 

Now I understand that tile takes some maintenance and in a house that's 55 years old, things have been done, re-done, etc.  Tile, at times, needs to be re-grouted.  The right way to do this is to take a grout saw, scritch out at least 1/8" of the existing grout, and re-grout it.  Simple. Easy. Cheap.  This is one of those household maintenance jobs I learned to do quite awhile ago. 

Every time I've been on the bathroom throne, I look at the floor.  Something just looked wrong about the grout. Not everywhere, but here and there.    My first thought was perhaps the floor was dirty and needed a good scrub.  Since the only proper way to give any floor a good cleaning is up close and personal with a scrub brush and a bucket, I learned why the grout didn't look right.

Some MORON decided to use sticky white BATHTUB CAULK instead of grout at some point 10+ years ago, before I bought the house.  The caulk had collected gunge which had basically blended in as grey with the proper grout.  Whoever did it may has well have used chewing gum for the mess I have on my hands.  Not only was the caulk in between the tiles, but it had squee-gee-d up onto the edges of them as well.

I get out my trusty grout saw thinking to make light, quick work of this mess. WRONG.  You see, caulk is flexible.  And sticky.  It just LAUGHED at me and my puny grout saw. Right.  I'll use a small screwdriver. WRONG. You see, one of tile grout's main ingredients is >>sand<<.  It's basically sandy cement. You guessed it... that screwdriver is ruined. Basically, I just ground down the end. 

Okay, so what next?  AH!  A utility knife with a blade.  YES!  SUCCESS... sort of. Same grinding down issue but now we're getting somewhere.  Slowly. VERY slowly. I might clean area around about 15 - 20 tiles before the point is ground off by the grout and the blade becomes useless.   Utility knife blades are not cheap and this is not easy on my hands, either.  Well, I've come up with a solution for cheap blades... disposable box cutters that come three to a pack from The Dollar Tree Store. Each box cutter has a single piece of metal that snaps off at the end to give you a new, sharp edge... basically 12-15 blades per cutter.  Eureka!!  They have about the same life as the more expensive utility knife blades, but ... well, they're cheap. 

Back to scritch, scritch, sweep, vacuum.  What a mess.  I started this literally weeks ago.  I'm about 1/3 of the way done.  It will take under an hour to re-grout the entire floor, but the prep time is killing me! 

Hair Monsters, Inc.

Okay.  I have this weird phobia... wet, hairy drain clogs.  Ew ew EW!  Even hair in the sink or on the soap squicks me utterly.  Makes my skin crawl and my stomach ... well, I won't go there. TMI.  Dry hair?  No problem. 

Here's the issue -> I  have long hair.  I shed, therefore I clog.  Drano and a plunger will only do so much.

What's the solution that doesn't involve a plumber and big bucks? I saw this little gizmo advertised on TV...  a ZipIt.  Just shove this little gizmo down the sink or bathtub drain, twist and pull up.  GROSS!!!!   OMG! The HORROR.  Seriously, none of my animals have every barfed up or pooped out anything that utterly disgusting.  Regardless,    I'm back to the having a clog issue combined with the lack of funds issue.  Time to get over it.

Went to the Lowe's with K. She needed roofing supplies for her little project, and I just wanted to get a home repair store fix.  Apparently there's a leak in her roof when it rains >sideways< as it did in a freakish sort of way a couple of weeks ago.  At any rate, I saw a ZipIt hanging in the plumbing supplies aisle. Made several appropriate gross-out noises as I explained my problem to while K while she was laughing at my particular phobia.  You see... K's hair is long. REALLY long. Makes me look like I've got a crew cut! Most women want to cry because they're jealous and it's... well, it's lovely.  And it hangs down to past her ass and there's ALOT of it... so she's familiar with hair monsters... but she's not getting my hair monster phobia. Not many do, frankly.  I asked her if she'd ever used a ZipIt on her drains. She tells me yes, and it works just fine.

$1.98. 

Cheaper than a plumber. 

Can I manage to really get over the gross-out factor? 

So.  I'm in the bathroom.  I remove the drain plug in the sink and shove the ZipIt down inside. Twist and pull up.  Seriously, I'm getting nauseous and twitchy just THINKING about what came up attached to the ZipIt!!  Slimy, grey, gross, hairy... and I had to do it several times to clear the drain.  The operative concept here is that I did it! Mission accomplished! There's only one minor hitch... I discovered when I tried to attempt the same manouvre in my bathtub? There's a goofy, sharp bend in the drain pipe. The ZipIt is too rigid to shove down there very far.  DAMMIT.  Looks like I'll be trying to find another unclogging tool that's just as efficient, inexpensive but more flexible. 

We're not even going to discuss toilet snakes.  That's for another day.

Today's xkcd comics says it all... FTS.

Clicky linky here:  
http://xkcd.com/137/


We have to get IN the game if we want to BE IN the game.  Show up and listen. Stand and be heard. Speak for others if they call strongly to my heart, my core. If I want to grow until the day I choose to leave this paradise, I need to learn something new every day.  If I'm truly fortunate, every hour.  I want to stop sleepwalking.


Strange what a little bit of dental nitrous will do to my philosophical outlook.

Yup.

FTS.

Project tomorrow - chisel and clean out the expansion join seal and break up crumbling concrete door slab. Mix up hydraulic cement.  Fill Hole. Lay first bead of expansion joint goo.  Should be a rockin' good time in my flannel!


But I won't doing doing the "little Sister Plod Along song" any more.  When things get too surreal, I'll watch my blind and deaf cat Helen as she finds new and creative ways  toss, throw and push crap off my desk,  nibble on electrical cords...HEY! GIMME THAT.  Right ... watchin' Helen bumble around happy as can be makes me feel fortunate.  Fortunate that she's one of my teachers, and also because she is my feline companion/familiar/buddy... and maybe I'm hers!

Driveway Estimate - OMG!

While I'm quite certain I could learn how to build the forms, pour and lay concrete, I am also a smart enough bear to know my limits or let my ego dictate folly, especially after what happened to B & N earlier this year in The Great Athens Basement Debacle! Imagine multiple cubic yards of concrete poured into your basement and the forms gave way -- not once but TWICE. No thanks...

At present, I don't have the mad carpentry skillz to build the forms, nor the upper body strength to man-handle wet concrete.  Not to mention that possibility of epic screw-up is orders of magnitude larger than I could ever create with just a little tub of cement patch.  Not something with which I choose to experiment... one needs to pick one's battles.  I could just imagine ending up being  a Failblog fix-it disaster "example." Truly, that's got to be the construction workers' equivalent having of your fashion felony printed in Cosmo's "What Not To Wear" hall of shame column.

I called in back-up. The estimate for the concrete slab for one FIFTH of the driveway has come in at $1400, so far!!!  FML.  Erm, no. That's WAY beyond my budget at the moment. I'll have to wait on that and pray that we don't have another winter like last year.  Snowpocalypse, my lily white ass.

Of the good, today, is that the hydraulic cement patch worked!  Big, nasty hole filled up and cured. Only one more significant place to be chiseled out and cemented between the stoop and the main driveway, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.  My hands are still sore and I have a dentist appointment.  Someone else gets to chisel and fill besides me.  Oh, goodie.

Now if I could just get over my addiction to Werthers candy...

Home Depot

Must.  Get. Supplies.

Did I mention that Home Depot is like a ToysRUs for grown-ups?  At least for this grown-up.

To be fair, I went in with a list. I stuck mostly to the list, and kept within my supplies budget for GSD. Then? Then I saw all a multitude of beautiful doormats on display and, well, got sucked in.  The old doormat was, well, OLD.  And SHEDDING. and UGLY. And cats had peed on it (I made it up.. jsut a little fib).  And no one would leave a baby on my doorstep if they saw that doormat (does anyone ever do that anymore?). And honestly,  the Big Bad Wolf would smirk, point and laugh at it and walk away without even TRYING to blow down my house. (Get a grip!). At this juncture, I realized that I'd gone right round the bend and just bought the damn thing. The cool, stripey doormat that matches the terracotta brick wall and aubergine trim on my house jumped into my shopping cart. Sue me.

I bought some more odds and sods including 2 tubes of driveway goo for the  expansion joints, a tube of 3m marine sealant, 2 tubes of silicone latex caulk,  a bucket of hydraulic cement, a bucket of joint compound, which promptly fell over in the back of my car and opened (GRR ooey gooey messy GRR), 2 different masonry trowels,  work lights, a can of Great Stuff foam, a bit of door trim for floors between the kitchen and the living room, and a very manly yellow and black rubber Stanley utility knife, named Fat Max. Heretofore we will be known as Fat Bastard.

I have to stop buying caulk. I have enough. MORE than enough. K understands this malady, but she's also got eleventy-billion tubes of the stuff for much the same reason! Even with all the Caulk of Insanity (The Princess Bride lovers will even hear the voice that goes with my bad pun) ... I had to get another caulk gun. I was like, are you kidding me??!! Not because I didn't have one. In fact, I have two.  However, the tubes of expansion joint goo are HUGE and will not fit into a standard caulk gun.  It's a racket, I'm quite certain.  Modest caulk on steroids and gone mad, I tell you! I give you Big Blue.  Quite certain these things are made by men that are over-compensating, but I digress.  However, I'm going to have to wait a few days to use the thing... my hands still haven't recovered from the first attempt at sealing the joint properly.

Oh well.  I'll always have spackling!  Frankly? I'd rather have Paris.

Driveway, Concrete and Seals, Part 2

Safety gear on! Check!
All tools and materials assembled! Check!
Hole chiseled out and prepped! Check!

Open the container of hydraulic cement and read the directions. See the tiny little scoop. Look at the big hole. Look at the tiny little scoop again.  Look at the big hole. Think to myself, 3 scoops of the cement plus one scoop of water is not going to be enough to fill that hole.  Read the directions again. Ponder ponder ponder...

Does hydraulic cement expand? The directions say it does. At what rate? No mention of this. So... how much to I need to mix up? This stuff isn't cheap and I don't want to waste it.

Right. Take off all the safety gear. Come inside and get online.  Call the manufacturer, UGL.  Tech support it out to lunch.  Okay, write a query and do a Google search.  Everything I read says that the cement expands to fit the hole, crack, whatever, but no actual specifications or quantifiable numbers.  Dammit.

Time to zen it.  I used the scoop included and mixed up my first batch. Not enough by degrees of magnitude, no matter what expansion properties it may have!  Unlike that spray foam insulation that seems to have TARDIS-like qualities inside just one can...  Anyone ever use that?   Okay, time to Zen it bigger. I used and old coffee cup as a scoop and mixed up another  batch.  Too much, but not by a large amount. I managed to stuff the rest of cement by hand (wearing protective gloves, of course), smoothed it out with my new trowel and voila! It's done.  On reflection, if I'd used the coffee cup initially, that might have been the perfect amount.  Then again, it might have dried too quickly to be useful.  I felt like Goldilocks!  This is too much, this is not enough...but what's enough?

As for the 3-5 minute hydraulic cement drying time?  Don't bet on it. It's REALLY fast! As directed, I used cold water to mix in with the cement. The directions say to slow the drying and/ or curing time, mix with colder water. Any colder, and I would have had to use ice water! Part way through mixing the larger batch, it was already hardening up in the mixing container, and I wasn't slacking or being a slow poke.

Lesson learned?  Mix up multiple small batches and use them as needed. Back to chiseling out the 2nd hole.

Driveways, Concrete and Seals, Part 1

Yesterday morning I had someone come by and look at my driveway because I need a new one.  My driveway is still the original one that was poured when the house was built in 1955... well, at least the patched, cracked and daily settling and crumbling ruins of the original.  This wouldn't be such a bad thing except (there are ALWAYS exceptions, aren't there?) the driveway slopes every so slightly toward the garage and the foundation. The brain trust who built these places cheaped out and didn't put any French drains between the driveway slabs, along side the driveway slabs OR at the base of the driveway that butts up to lip of the garage. Also, the foundations?  Underground.  Sooooo.... all the water runs toward the garage, has no means of runoff other than the trenches I've dug to funnel it off beside the slabs. and you guessed it, seeps down the foundation at compromised seal.  This is creating a whole other set of problems inside the house, but that meditation is for another day.

At any rate, there was a water proof seal at the lip of the garage at one point.  I think what they're really called is expansion joints. At any rate, this joint / seal was then covered up by a bad concrete patch job a few years ago. I thought I'd done a decent job of redoing that seal last weekend, but there was this one. little. piece. of loose concrete perpendicular to what I'd repaired.  Smack in the middle.   Could I leave it alone?  Nooooo... Like a scab that you just can't stop picking...  My futzing revealed another concrete breach...a quarter-sized hole  that is wide open down the the foundation wall.  DAMMIT!  Since this hole is part of the slab that's going to be replaced in the not-too-distant future, I hope, I'm going to mix up a little hydraulic cement today and use my spiffy new masonry trowels and see if that small, temporary fix will help.  If nothing else, I'm going go learn how to mix up and use hydraulic cement.  And I get to play with my stone working chisels and make some noise!  Woo Hoo!

Saturday - Garage seal, Home Depot and Plans

My Get Shit Done list is huge - seriously.  I keep it on  an Excel Spreadsheet, tasks separated room by room.  Each room or area has a sub-list. Lest anyone think I'm Miss Organization? I'm SO NOT.  I have ADHD.... I wish!

At any rate, I do have periods of hyperfocus.  When that happens, I used it to the fullest extent possible, whether it's  weeding or beading or making lists.    In one of these periods, I created my GSD list.

Yesterday I started or completed several things.  I painted the spare room door to match all the others.

Materials used:

Wash rag
Small bucket
TSP to clean/prep it
An old towel for a drop cloth
A paint roller
A Purdy brush to paint around the door knob
A paint tray
Paint
Saran wrap for the roller and paint brush in between coats
A Stanley phillips head screwdriver to  loosen and the reattach the door knob

Job took a total of 1 hour.  This has been irritating me for  >> 4 years<<! What a lesson in Just Do It.


I prepped and began fixing the concrete seal between my driveway slab and the lip of the garage.  A few days ago I chiseled out some of the cracked patch cement, pulled away the old, gooey seal and then filled what I could with reach Great Stuff foam. http://greatstuff.dow.com/ I really hate how that stuff is almost uncontrollable and sticks to every damn thing, BUT it's aces for filling gaps and cracks. Yesterday I trimmed the excess away with a utility knife, loaded my caulk gun with Quicrete concrete repair went to it. Suffice to say that hard to squeeze that stuff out is an understatement!  I'm not a wimp, but I finally gave up and used the edge of a step to push the caulk gun handle and spread the concrete seal stuff with a putty knife.  It's ... okay, but it wasn't  enough to really do the job well.  I needed something that would be flexible, easier to work with, and would fill larger gaps.

Time for a trip to Home Depot!!

Eat. Pray. Love. --- Yeah, right.

Eat. Pray. Love. The multi-gazillion copies of the book printed, translated into 40 languages, made into a motion picture starring the fabulous Julia Roberts about one woman's year long journey to Italy, India and Bali to find herself after a horrible divorce.  The already wildly successful woman who thought she was an old maid at 36.   The Home Shopping Network is pimping EPL merchandise to coincide with the movie's premier - candles that smell like Italy, India and Bali, dream journals, tacky rhine-stone encrusted bracelets. The Daily Show even did a send up in one of their "news reports" last week. Now THAT was funny... thanks, dude!.

Yeah, I read it.  Parts of it were touching, funny, poignant and frankly all too familiar, especially right now as I go through my own horrible divorce.    Face it... who wouldn't want to go globe trotting for a year to such fabulous places, without a care in the world other than well, eating, praying and/or loving? Wouldn't that be grand?  Ah well, maybe I'll just buy the candle set to remind myself that yes, I'm worth it.  I deserve it. I matter. Oh please.  Come back to real life, people.  Lessee, would the candles smell like fascism, raw sewage and genocide?

Truth be told?  I'm jealous.  I'll admit it. There have been a couple of times in my life where I would have LOVED to piss off for a year.  Frankly, I'm quite sure that anyone reading this would most likely agree. D. after she lost her daughter to cancer 2 years ago. My friend S who lost his little boy.  For me?  Lessee. When were those times.... After I survived cancer?  Yup. After my  boss/mentor/friend died after her 4 year struggle with cancer?  Yup.  After the love of my life just walked out?  Yup.  After being violently ill for 4 months with a recurrance of Lyme disease that nearly killed me?  Yup. After the one person in my family that I loved more than life itself died in less than a week? Yup.  Let me tell you, there isn't ANY candle or dream journal that's going to replace a year off in paradise after a year of hell on earth. But the fact of the matter?

I can't. My friend K. who's experiencing her own private hell, orders of magnitude larger than my own, can't. Why?  Because we have to work. We have responsibilities.  No work = no money = no food, clothing or shelter.  Because even though we're struggling through our own hellish divorces, and crises of faith, we are not privileged, wealthy, or have publishers willing to give us an advance for a book we'll write after our year of eating, praying and loving because we're already successful.  We have to carry on with our lives because any savings we had are now gone, spent in large parts supporting our husbands and trying to build lives with them.  Hers because he was an "artist." Mine because he lost his job, so I cashed out my retirement fund. I was banking on his potential.  Partnerships and lives that we thought we were helping to build, create, live... until the boys (and I'm not going to call them men) decided, for one reason or another, to leave. 

So with all my thrashing around, and crying and struggling for the last 12 months... actually the last 4 years, and frankly letting things fall apart?   Projects half done. Minor. Major. Everything in between.  I looked around and made a list.  My GSD list.

Get. Shit. Done.

Then one night last week, while on the phone with K, I spackled a small area in my kitchen that's bugged me for YEARS.  Took less than 5 minutes.  Didn't think such a small thing could be a really a big deal until I saw it the next morning when I was brewing up a pot of tea.   I looked at that spot and ... !!!  I didn't feel resentful, frustrated, ashamed, angry at myself, or my ex for leaving yet another thing half done/undone.  Instead, I felt HAPPY and PROUD OF MYSELF.  Such a small thing that turned out to be and AHA! moment. *I* did that.  *I* fixed it. No one helped me. In that moment, I decided that I want to feel like that every day by attending to the needful here at home.  Instead of looking around in despair, I want to look around and feel proud.   Hand tools! Power tools! Learning!  AWESOME!

For the next 12 months, I'm going blog my progress as meditation while I move through the divorce.  I can meditate or I can spackle. How about I meditate WHILE I spackle? Yeah!

Home Depot, here I come!