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Thanks,
Kathleen
please bear in mind that those bags of ready mix are onlyabout a half a cubi foot;I have a half a pallet of them on my truck as I type this. I live so far out that the minuinmum the ready mix company will deliver is three yards. I only need 21 cubic fee. The cost doing it this way is 105 dollars per yard,a lot of back brakikng labor,and concrete that hasn't the strength of redimix with fiber mesh. Get the truck in there and swallow the price. Make absolutely sure that you have rebar and that they include that fibermesh. You will be happier!!!K. Sanderson said:Thank you, uncle Will. Readi-mix is running $77-$80.50/cu.yd. here, while pre-mix in bags would (I think, if I guessed anywhere close on final volume) *only* be about $57/cu.yd. Looks like cement plus sand plus gravel might run us around $40/cu.yd., or so. It will help to be able to make the garage floor only four inches thick -- we already planned to use reinforcing mesh. Only I don't know if I can manage 94 lb. bags of cement!!50 lb. bags of feed are pretty close to my limit.
Nine regular trusses with one end truss are going to cost almost $700, readi-mix concrete plus forms, re-bar, mesh, and anchor bolts I figured at around $1500 -- and we are trying to stay under $3,000 for the whole thing! We were quoted about $10,000 for a contractor to build this 20'X22' attached garage. I'm going to need to build a house one of these days -- am cringing at the thought already.
Kathleen
Interesting Bret F!Bret F said:I have done garage pads in an unorhtodox method, with good results. The last one was 24' x 25' x 6" deep (11.1 yards).
I had a dump truck deliver "road mix" that we spread out evenly with the tractor and scraper blade. I framed in the pad space with 2x8's prior to putting the gravel down. For a five bag mix, I purchased 56 bags of Portland Cement. I drew divisions in the gravel for the 56 bags and spread out the cement evenly. Then we brought in a rototiller and dry mixed the gravel and cement.
Next we had a garden hose on each side of the tiller putting water where it was mixing. The tiller would not get tight at the edges so we shoveled that mix into the wet mix we were making. This method uses incrediblily larger amounts of water that standard cement mixing. After is was all mixed we ran a shaker across it to drive the rocks down. That was followed up by a bull float to bring it all realitvely flat. (My handle was a bit short, so I have a dip in the back 2' of the garage). After it was set up, I troweled it out twice.
There were five of us doing the work and the actual mixing and floating phase took about 1-1/2 to 2 hours. The total cost for it was about 20 percent of what the local concrete company would have charged.
We did this seciton in '98 and park a car and pick-up on it and have no cracks.
Bret