Fun with Formwork

Well, my friends, I’m extremely excited to tell you that as I sit here, still dirty from the day’s work, our concrete projects are done. But before I reveal our completed sidewalk, I thought I’d share a very important -- albeit not that interesting -- part of the process. The formwork itself was not too difficult to build; prepping the area was probably the worst part, actually. For those of you who didn’t read my last post, here’s what the side of our house looked like before:

Ugh. Can you say, trashy?

So we moved all the extra bricks out of the way, got rid of a bunch of concrete chunks, and graded the dirt. Naturally, it was extremely windy the day we did this. We already had some straight 2x4’s that we were able to use, but had to go buy a 1x6, stakes, and stringline.

We screwed the 1x6 into the fence (it will remain there permanently unless we ever need to pry it out for some reason) and worked off of that to set the 2x4’s. The sidewalk needed to slope from our brick sidewalk down to the grass in the backyard. Somewhere in the middle of this whole process, I made the remark that the formwork looked pretty high in comparison to the grass, but for some reason, we kept on going.

After staking all the boards down (and hoping we didn’t hit our sprinkler line in the process), we realized that yes, it was ridiculously high and we would have a big step down to the lawn. Unfortunately, it wasn’t something that could just be ignored, so we (Luke) went back and moved the 1x6, unscrewed all the stakes from the 2x4’s, dug out more dirt, and pounded everything back into the ground. My mood at this point in time was not particularly pleasant, so I didn’t even take any pictures.

With that said, here is the completed, correct-height formwork:

It already looks way better back here, don’t you think? Luke convinced me that a 3½-foot wide sidewalk would be a lot nicer than a 3-foot sidewalk, although it would mean more concrete. The whole thing is about 18 feet long, and there are 8"-wide strips at each end. Which means we’ll have a nice little landscaping bed here… I’m thinking a possible vegetable garden is in our future??

But wait...what about the hole in the basement, you ask? Well, you’ll just have to hang tight until my next post, when ALL is revealed (including a crapload of pictures)!