Revenge of the Window Well

Well that didn't last long

That's right folks, the window well fix did not hold up very well, or at all. Apparently old concrete doesn't like to cure very well. Oh sure it looked nice and solid after it dried, wouldn't even chip when I hit it with a rock! One rain storm though and we see what happens. All the sand and clay from the concrete washed away into the well leaving my bricks sitting on a thin pile of very water permeable pebbles. So now I have 60 pounds of unusable concrete powder sitting in the shed waiting for me to figure out how to throw it away without the town knowing.

This guy knows what I'm talking about

I had to bite the bullet and buy new materials. This time I went with some repair cement to hold the bricks onto the old concrete well and then asphalt patch to help the water stay away. This project actually went well for the most part. I do recommend buying a mixing attachment for your drill instead of using the Gregg technique. Using an old piece of wood from a cabinet cutting to mix everything in an old paint bucket is a bit tedious. I'm more of a "don't make a plan and when you need something grab the closest item" kinda guy.

Like I mentioned, the bricks went back down fairly easily. I took the fast approach and just pushed all the gravel from the bad patch into the window well. You know, to help with drainage....

I decided against fixing the sag because I forgot it was there until I finished

This time I wanted to get more water sealing done before the rain came and washed away my beautiful masonry job. This is where the asphalt patch comes in. Apparently 'they' make this horrifying smelling goop that you can spread on cracks in asphalt to patch it up. It both looks like and has the odor of stuff you generally don't want smeared all over your house. It's outside though, and the guy on the bucket it came in looked happy, so I went for it. First I had to dig out even more weeds that had taken up residence in the crevasse betwixt my foundation and driveway. A fun part about this type of work is that no man has designed a tool to do this type of work efficiently in a 1 inch wide garden, so I just dug away with my hands till it was 'good nuff' or I was tired. These things are hard to gauge.

Luckily my moss and algae farms were able to be spared from the culling

In retrospect I should have filled in all the depressions with something first so that when I patched it the water would just run merrily on its way. Without thinking about that all I did was seal in a nice pond for the carpenter ants to vacation in when they are finished at the all-you-can eat rotten wood bar. But once the dirt was moved safely 1 foot away from where I was working I went to town on the patching process.

The bucket it came in claims it works really well

The main issue with this stuff is that it is designed for half inch cracks in your driveway. Not for resealing the Grand Canyon that has opened up between your house and the rest of the world. Generally I don't let facts discourage me and just kept troweling and smoothing until it looked like it was done. This was made difficult as the bucket said to 'Work quickly as material sets within minutes'. I took that to mean I had to throw huge piles of this crap along the length of my house and smooth it down manically before I had lumps of asphalt dried everywhere. A panicked Gregg is not who you want doing anything handy around the house. Or anything at all really.

Pro Tip: Instructions always lie

I'm going to give it a try on this other crack in my bedroom wall

It has been a few days and some areas of the patch still haven't dried. I neglected to think about the ramifications of putting this brown mess onto wet soil. The patch is trying to dry at the same time that it is trying to suck all the moisture out of the earth. So it dries a bit, gets a bit more wet, dries some more, etc. I think the patch is starting to win. However, because the patch was so thick it started to dry with its own cracks that I now have to repair. Surprisingly it lasted the same amount of time as when the DPW uses it on our roads.

It is suppose to turn black as it dries. It will match the light grey of everything around it.

I have purchased another couple buckets of this stuff to go back and repair all the new cracks and finish up the portions of the foundation that I wasn't able to get to. Unfortunately they only sell it in little buckets. I asked the guy at the home improvement store if they had bigger buckets and he said 'It is for fixing cracks. If you have enough cracks that you need a bigger bucket you may need to resurface your driveway.'. He looked at me funny/scared when I grabbed two buckets and said that I was going to use it to waterproof my basement.

Step 1 is finished. Hopefully we can get a few days of dry weather all in a row so that I can go out and finish this process. Ideally this global warming stuff will pick up and then I won't have to worry about water getting in the house at all.

- The Porter -