natedagg
Gold Star Member
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2005
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That is so true, helped my brother put up a big shed a few years ago and that was the worst part. Made it abundantly clear to the concrete guy how important it was to be level... and one corner ended up two inches shorter than the rest (20 foot long slab). The whole point of hiring the concrete guy was to save time, would have just done it ourselves if we knew the pro couldn't get it level. Cost us a day to get it shimmed and level before we could finish the roof. Huge ass pain.
I am an aspiring Gary Barnidge, meaning I want to make millions during my day job, but keep it blue collar and be a hero for 2nd and 3rd shift. By all that, I mean that I don't have many blue-collar skills, but I love doing stuff. So the reason I went with 96 square foot pavers on top of leveling sand on top of gravel on top of some queer anti-growth gardening layer was that I don't know how to pour concrete. I wouldn't care but my pie-in-the-sky project is to re-do our deck to look like this:
which is stained concrete to look like slate, which means likely I'll have to outsource it. The shed foundation would have been good practice, but it's a bit of a risk having a couple of tons of concrete setting wrong... Here's where someone is supposed to reply and tell me that the deck project isn't that hard, btw...
My general rule is that I do what my wife will let me get away with, within the constraints of time, and it can't be too hard (skilled not labor) of a project. This means that when I watch it on youtube, I have to say "piece of cake", and that it will take around 6x the projected amount of time. For the deck, I might rent/buy a jackhammer and do the demolition, since I can't irrevocably fuck that up.
So yeah, RGIII, don't fuck around and come back and win us any games motherfucker. I can't afford the time to be interested.