Say No to Crack

You ever have one... or a few... of those things around the house that just makes you nuts?  You see it on a daily basis, you want it fixed, you know it's going to get worse and more expensive if you don't take care of it, yet you can't quite seem to find a moment to devote to it?

For me that is my driveway.  I see it every time I leave the house.  Every time I come home.  Every time I go to check the mail... etc., you get the picture.  It's not horribly bad.  But it's full of cracks.  It looks like they poured the concrete slab and then were just too busy to go back and cut the lines to allow for settling and movement.  So the driveway created its own cracks.

They're huge.  I'm kind of surprised I didn't find missing neighborhood children in them when I was cleaning them out to repair them.  Yesterday the boys and I found a homemade weed killer concoction on Pinterest.  I've used Round-Up before, and don't get me wrong - it works amazingly well - but I really don't want to use chemical crap like that anymore.  The recipe I found was for 1/4 cup salt, 1 squeeze of dish detergent (how scientific), and then filled the rest of my 32 oz spray bottle with white vinegar.  We sprayed it all over the stubborn weeds that were growing out of some of the cement cracks.  Came back this morning and they were all brown and sad looking.  Perfecto!

I borrowed a pressure washer from my neighbor (example of it is pictured below).  It's so great to have friendly neighbors, especially ones with tools that I'm lacking.  But I really just need to go purchase one of these soon.  I sprayed the cracks until they were as clean as a whistle, and while I was at it I gave the entire driveway a nice cleaning too.  You could try using your garden hose for this part of the job, but you are never going to get the same kind of pressure.  The pressure washer was able to dislodge some of the wiggly pieces of cement.  Can't be repairing the cracks with loose pieces stuck in there.

With the driveway clean and dry, I made a run to Home Depot and grabbed my concrete patch made by DAP.  They only had smaller tubs of the premixed.  The amount you need really varies depending upon how big your driveway is, how many cracks you have to fill, and how deep/wide those cracks are.  Really wish I had picked up 4 of the tubs because I did run out.  :(

   

Ready to apply, I misted the crack I was about to fill (oh jeez, just typing that all I can think of is a line from a Bob Marley - comedian - sketch about filling a leaky crack with some caulk... but I digress) and then scooped out the patch mix and pressed it into place.  Finished by running my putty knife at a sweet 45-degree angle to smooth things out.  "Smooth" is not the best term to use to describe what you end up with - but really who cares... it's a driveway after all.  It's rough, and raggedy on the edges and all over.  But the cracks are beautifully filled and smoothed into the driveway.

  

While a plastic putty knife might help you fill one or two cracks, a stiff metal putty knife will take care of the whole driveway.

In about 24 hours I could park the cars back on it.  Or I can prepare to seal it with a stain or concrete paint.  Thinking the concrete paint is the way to go.  I'm actually excited about it, which seems like a silly thing to get excited about, but when you spend all day hosing down a driveway and scraping concrete patch into place the idea of lazily rolling on some paint for an instant transformation sounds so nice.

Now to go find me some After-Sun Soother (uforya.com) for the sunburn I'm pretty sure is developing.