Project Suckage

Working a project involves a lot of long, labor-intensive hours sometimes.  But in the end I usually get to sit back and see this horrible thing that I've revamped into greatness.  It makes me happy and keeps my momentum going for the next project.

This current project is not one of those.  It has had the long hours.  But it's not resulting in greatness - so far.  I had considered not writing about it until it was just the way I wanted it.  Then I realized that a lot of people don't ever attempt a project because they fear it will look hideous.  They think they'll screw it up.  And I realized that a lot of projects I work on don't turn out how I envision them - at first - but then I take a step back, try a different approach, and in the end I get what I want.  So I'm showing you what I did wrong here, so you don't make the same mistakes, and so you can see that it doesn't have to be perfect the first time you try to fix something.  After all, you wouldn't learn anything if everything always turned out spectacular the first time.

I posted a little while back about filling the cracks in the driveway in preparation for resurfacing/resealing it.  The repair of the cracks went great.  But now I needed to push on to resurface the driveway to protect it from the elements and prevent future deterioration.  I went to Home Depot and picked up a 5 gallon bucket of Rustoleum Extreme Concrete Restore - this part I did right.  They have other Restore products, and some are for concrete, but this one you need for the driveway to resist hot tire pick-up.  It says it's 10x thicker than paint.

The first 2 mistakes I made were with the color and then look how I poured it out into a paint roller tray.  Well, I opened the twist cap to pour it out.  Huge mistake.  With this product you really have to pop the whole lid open and mix up the contents.  I figured that since I had just left Home Depot (where this bucket sat for a few minutes in the shaking machine, that I was all set... but that's not the case with something as thick as this.  By the time I got down to the bottom of the bucket I realized what I was pouring off the top was all the liquid and was left with a lot of sludgy stuff that I couldn't seem to roll onto the driveway.  So do yourself a favor and pick up one of those paint stirring paddles - and you'll want the metal one (it's sturdier than the plastic ones).  I just used the mixing paddle I have left over from mixing tile grout, so if you have one of those it works well too.  Put your drill on a low speed (so you don't splatter everywhere) and get that stuff that stuck to the bottom mixing into the more liquid stuff at the top.

This is what they look like.

So I took this fancy picture of my application equipment.  You can see (from left to right) my paint brush, the 9-inch plastic honeycomb-like roller, and the tiny 3-inch roller.  Now looking back, the 3-inch roller will be useless.  I was using it to get the edges better (as shown below) but since I had also poured all the liquidy stuff off the top, this was easy to do.  If you mixed this stuff the right way, this roller is going to be hard pressed to pick up and apply any of that stuff, so don't bother.

You do have to find a way to get the edges well and to also get in around things like where the driveway meets the garage, or the front steps, so use the paint brush for those spots instead of this little roller.

 

 The big roller is what will apply most of the product.  When I went looking for a picture of it I also found that they do offer a smaller one for little rollers... but you won't find it at Home Depot, or at least they didn't offer it at my local one.  Once I had the product thoroughly mixed up, I found it easiest to just dip my roller into the huge bucket, and take that super saturated roller and push it across the driveway.  You won't be going back and worth like when you paint a wall, instead you're just pushing it down into the concrete and moving the product forward until it all leaves the honeycomb roller, and then you go back for more.  Once you do a few lines of it you get a feel for how to push on it and how to keep from having a berm of the product left behind.  You want it smooth and uniform.  If you don't want to break your body, I'd get a good paint roller and an extension pole for it.  These you can find anywhere.  

Go for the simplest set-up.  And the thread on the end of the extension pole meets up universally for the paint rollers... and for brooms, and mop heads, etc.  They do make some [extension poles] that can be adjusted to different lengths.  And they're "oh so easy to adjust", but the one we have sucks something awful and doesn't lock well into position, which means it's constantly coming loose and shortening up when you push on it.  Terrible idea.  I won't buy one of those again.

Okay, so the next way I made a terrible choice was in the color selection.  I didn't want something ridiculous, like bright green or yellow, so I tried to choose a neutral color.  I went for a dark gray - called "Carbon" on the color sheet.  Because we can all tell from a 2x2 cm square how that's going to look on our driveway.  Grrrr.   You can't get a tester of this stuff either, so you really have to bite the bullet and hope you made a good choice.  I didn't.  It was too dark.  It might have looked good if you had a different colored house and front steps.  But next to mine it just looked weird, and had a blue-ish tinge to it.  I knew I was going to need 2 coats anyway, so back to Home Depot I went this morning to collect 2 more of these 5 gallon buckets, which incidentally only claim to hold 4 gallons of material (because the top 4 inches of the bucket is empty) and really their claim for 4 gallons is just them rounding up from 3.75!  

Picked up 2 buckets this time, thinking that would allow me to cover up the carbon color from yesterday, and finish applying the first coat to the untouched side of the driveway.  Wrong again!  You can see in the picture below, that I really only managed to make it back up the one side and part a few passes across the top of the other side.  I can't explain why this was the case.  The bottom portion of the side I covered hadn't received the first color, and was in really bad shape, so I think it was sucking up the product like crazy.  Perhaps that's why it took so much of it to cover approximately the same area.  So keep that in mind when you're trying to estimate how much of it you'll need.  The bucket says it will cover 100-120 sq feet with 2 coats - so that's 200-240 sq ft with 1 coat, and I had 2 buckets... so 400-480.  Ya, that's about right.  My driveway is just shy of 800 sq ft (including the sidewalk).  I think when I first looked into the product I had it in my head that one bucket would cover 400 sq ft, but clearly I was wrong.

So my second color choice was the "Graywash".  I don't know how I feel about it.  I have to let it cure for a while and then step back and look at it.  This is my biggest problem with a project.  I have such a hard time picking colors for things because it never is exactly what I want.  This one just seems a little bright to me, but maybe it will grow on me after a few days.  And if I don't end up liking it, I probably will finish up the other coat and the other side of the driveway in the same color and then look into staining it with something to add some brown/tan hues to it.  Note, the second coat is a necessary step.  I took a picture to show what it looks like in some places after just one coat (as the moisture is getting sucked into the porous concrete) and it develops some crackling (that you want on your shabby chic furniture, not your driveway), but this is smoothed out with the second pass.

 You are supposed to get enough product to do the whole project because you want to keep working off the wet edge of where you had just rolled to.  That just won't be possible for this project.  So I accept the fact that there may be a little ridge down the middle - but it will still look better than the cracked-to-hell falling apart mess that I started with.

I would have gone back to Home Depot again - naturally after changing my clothes and trying to appear different as I don't want them to think I'm stalking them more than once per day - but those massive buckets of goop are going to run you a solid $99 each!  And that's just not in the budget until another payday passes.  Plus, I was about to loose my cool with my 6 and 8 year old boys because they just couldn't manage to understand that I was unable to drop what I was doing to assist them in their projects.  They also kept insisting they should help paint but were already having trouble remembering not to walk on the driveway, so painting tips probably weren't going to be heard either.

So you can see it's been a couple of long days, without any sort of results to pat myself on the back about.  What a bummer.  And now I have to look at this every time I leave or come home until I manage to fix it to my liking.  Don't let the fear of messing something up keep you from trying.  How boring would that be?  And if I never messed something up, my husband wouldn't have any material when it came time to pick on each other.  ;)

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.