Site Navigation:
Craig's twitter feed:
Tweets by @gevmage
Our lifestyle is such that my wife and I both need a reliable car for work. We can go for short periods with just one car, but that becomes problematic when I need to go on a business trip.
Once we realized that the vintage beetle had problems, we needed to have a third car. That brought us up to three cars, with a two-car garage. So starting from then (three years ago) the third car parks outside, mostly on a spot where the right front tire sits in what used to be a flowerbed.
That's fine when the weather's dry. However, when it's wet, the car sinks into the dirt and makes a mess. So at some point I bought some hexagonal concrete tiles that I could park the car on. That wasn't much better. Again, fine when the ground was dry. When it was wet, the car pushed the tiles into the ground and made a bigger mess.
Since then I've been exploring options for putting a base under the tiles. I finally came around to the idea of putting a bed of concrete in the ground and putting the tiles on top of that. That should keep them stable. Sometime this year, I started excavating the ground in a triangular shape. As late summer and then early fall continued, I realized that I was running out of time to do it this year.
I got serious at the end of August. Here's the hole on August 31:
Heres the whole earlier in the week, with wood forms on two sides and the bottom of the whole approximately level.
Yesterday, this is the whole with sand in the bottom to smooth out the surface.
Unfortunately, I got up too late yesterday to get the concrete in before the rain came. And it was predicted to rain all day yesterday. For whatever reason, I ended up getting up early this morning, an little after 6. I looked at the radar and there wasn't going to be rain for about an hour, so I went ahead and got the concrete put in. I was in enough of a hurry that I couldn't take pictures. I'll have some tomorrow, hopefully.
I put tarps over the concrete to try to slow down the water seeping in. It worked somewhat, but the ground started leaching water into the area. We finally got a break in the rain after supper, so I went out and checked the concrete. It seems intact for the most part, and more or less how I wanted it. I don't think the rain did any grevious damage. Tomorrow's supposed to be dry and warmer, so I'll get a better chance to look at it then.