I’m going to skip over all the things that I haven’t kept the blog updated about and go straight into covering various projects. So, I apologize that they won’t be posted in chronological order, since we’ve done a ton of projects since I fell off the posting timeline and the effort involved in getting caught up on everything is a big reason I haven’t bothered.
So, concrete demo. Let’s back up a step. When we bought the house, there was a two car garage in the back (we have an alley). It was probably a 1.5 car garage when it was built but they poured a three foot concrete pad next to the garage and literally moved the wall over, increasing the door size in the process and adding a single car door to the yard (maybe the original door? I don’t know) and extending the roof to reach the wall in its new location. So the garage was in bad shape, none of it was done well, and we tore it down years ago. In addition, the back yard had a concrete patio covering most of the area in back.
In addition to wanting a new garage, we wanted to get rid of the concrete patio. We plan to eventually put in a smaller paver patio. When we started getting quotes on the garage, we asked for removal of the patio concrete at the same time. When we took out the loan to finish the house, we wound up removing the garage because the overall price tag was just too much.
In hindsight, it may have been better to just do it, since the prices have not come down in the subsequent years. The garage quotes were really high and we started looking for any way to bring the price down. One of the ways to do that was demo the concrete ourselves.
So, we got a hand-me-down barely-used electric jackhammer from Sarah’s dad and set to work. As with most of these projects, it was harder and took longer than expected, but three heavy-debris dumpsters later, we’d completely cleared the back yard of concrete. The hardest bits were reinforced with steel mesh, and 4-8 inches thick throughout, with most of the patio being 6 inches thick.
The kids helped too, using the jackhammer (with supervision), hauling concrete chunks, and raking and shoveling the tinier bits. The neighbors did not really appreciate us using the loud jackhammer on and off for a couple months. We tried to limit how long we went and which days to be less annoying, but I’m sure we tried their patience. When we got to the back of the yard, we needed to remove and re-build the fence which was a project in and of itself.
In the end, all this was probably not worth it. If I’d known the patio was six inches thick with re-mesh, I may have just paid to have it done since while it absolutely saved us a couple-few thousands of dollars, it wasn’t so much that it felt truly worth the time and effort.
With the concrete removed, we still have a few steps before we’re ready to build a garage, but I’ll cover that in the next post.