Well I suggest going to the corner for a day or 2 and see if Larry has anything good in the cooler. ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Rossi To: Blind Handyman List Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 3:18 PM Subject: [BlindHandyMan] Basement door project update.
About a week ago, I borrowed a cement mixer from Breeze, another Blind Handyman lister. Turns out that his mixer is significantly heavier than the one I rented in the past. However, it was much cheaper, only cost me a couple of magazine subscriptions for his kids fund raiser, and I get to keep it for more than a day. However, it did take three of us to drag the damn thing up the steps. Well, I had finally gotten the hole finished, the paver base tamped, the sand screeded off nice and flat and level, and the first course of land scaping blocks laid nice and flat and level. Sooo, I took Friday off, and my brother, wanting to see what it might be like to actually work with his hands, came over to the house Friday morning. Almost everything was ready and in place. I pulled the 20 40 pound bags of cement from the basement and lifted them up to my brother who then stacked them beside the cement mixer. After that was done, we fired up the mixer and I was dumping the bags and water into the mixer five at a time. After it was mixed, we dumped the mixer, my brother shoveled it into the pit, and Teresa raked it out. While Rob was shoveling and Teresa raking, I would get the next load of cement mixing. After we had gone through all the cement, I helped Teresa float the cement off. I had set up a screed board to angle the cement down toward the drain, and that worked very nicely. We then kind of puddled the cement up around the edges so that water would flow toward the drain from any position on the slab. All went well. There was some extra cement, but I plugged a few holes around the yard and disappeared it reasonably well. On Saturday and Sunday, I managed to lay three courses of blocks and back fill behind the courses with gravel. I don't have to cut many blocks but have found it pretty easy, especially since a buddy at work loaned me his diamond blade for my circ saw. There is one problem corner where I have to cut the blocks in strange ways, and there was no way to anchor the first block, nor the blocks that sit above it, so I have been mortaring them to the house to keep them from shifting. the pin system works pretty well for the rest of the blocks, but it can be frustrating to scrape the gravel from the slots before laying the next course. Then trying to get them to line up so that the pins slide home is usually easy, but occasionally tedious. The damn thing is sucking up gravel faster than my back can recover from hauling 60 pound bags up the steps. I probably need another 20 bags before I am done. I placed sonno tubes at the ends of the side walls in preparation for anchoring posts for railings. I found a very cool device for helping with this. It is a 30 inch long spike with a 4X4 box on top. I will sink the spike into the cement in the middle of the sonno tube, then after it is set, I can just drop the 4X4 railing post into the box and bolt it in place. I should have the wall complete by the end of the weekend, but it will take another week or two before I get the railings in place, and the two wooden steps built and installed in the pit. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [email protected] Tel: (412) 268-9081 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
