Jayne over at Dainty Digs was plotting some oh-so-deserved punishment for the "sucky previous owners" of her home today. And I have to say I know just how she feels.
I got nothing done today. (Except for mowing the front yard.) I had hoped to get all of the perimeter bricks in place and FINISH the porch. Yeah, that's what I'd hoped.
Instead, I spent no less than three hours in the burning hot sun fighting with the porch. Fighting with the porch because, while I had been busy demoing the sidewalk, I had failed to notice that the nice, solid slab under the porch flows out from under it. That's why there was that funky layer of caulkish like stuff connecting the porch and the sidewalk. They just poured the sidewalk in front of it and thought no more about the shoddy job they'd done with the porch slab.
In order to get the face bricks to line up square, I tried to smooth the jagged edges of the slab. Easier said than done. The RotoZip helped some. I used the masonry wheel to wear some of it down and then put a chisel into the saw lines. Then, in sheer and utter frustration, I started beating the hell out of it with a hammer. That actually worked to a point. Well enough anyway that I got the brickwork started.
I cut some other bricks for the side of the porch edge and started digging at the dirt along the edge of the walkway, trying to get that lined up. I'm glad I covered the pit with plastic. It was pretty damp even so, but once I uncovered it and the sun got on it for a while, it was fine. Without the plastic, I'd have been working in a mudpit. As it was, the second half is a mudpit. The plastic was covered by no less than 4 inches of water! So, I drained it, pulled it off, cleaned it off and then put it back. (They were predicting rain but now ... who knows? Hoping for NO rain!)
It's been a long, hot, frustrating day. I guess the only consolation I have is that I don't have to worry about exacting any vigilante-style justice (by making them even out the jagged edges WITH AN EMERY BOARD) on the idiots who poured this porch to prevent them from doing it to anyone else. They're probably already dead.
A non-professional,faux home improvement blog dedicated to the insane yet diligent do-it-yourselfer,thoroughly peppered with random views and thoughts from me
2 comments:
I didn't accomplish much today, either. It was, as my cousin Randy said, "hotter than the hubs of hell".
Oh, I can so relate! When we put in my vegetable beds on the front of my house this spring, we had to level off the ground first. You wouldn't BELIEVE the hodge podge of crap the previous owners had used to "landscape" with, if you can call it that, which had long since been allowed to grow over. Ugh! What a horrible chore to dig it all out!
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