Pouring Concrete for Dummies

Compacting sand before pour

If you took a poll of the staffers at the Antisocial Network, pouring concrete might be one of their least favorite jobs – right up there with laying ceramic floor tile and working inside a sink cabinet to install plumbing. Well, one allows that the worst is replacing a sewage injector pump. Right that... Regardless, we were smart enough, no experienced enough to know that eHowian Marsanne Petty was talking through her hat when she posted "How to Pour Concrete on Sand" for the mother lode of misinformation, a post that's now migrated to GardenGuides.com.¹

Petty wandered over to a now-defunct website and cherry-picked a few steps out of an article about pouring a slab for a garage. Marsanne then wrote her article, opening with the bizarre assumption that someone's laying a patio:

"Patios can turn out really well when concrete is poured over sand. With the sand properly leveled, the patio will be relatively flat, a perfect space for chairs and a small table for entertaining."

Ummm, yeah: you just level the sand so your patio will be "relatively flat" (we'd prefer completely flat, ourselves). In fact, you have to compact sand before pouring a slab over it, a step Petty apparently forgot to mention. She did, say, however, to dampen the sand and then rake it... Moron.

Following is some of Marsanne's more stupid verbiage in her instructions:

• "Mark the boundaries of your sand area with a chalk line from a building supply store." – "Mark" it? Wouldn't it be a good idea to use stakes and string instead of just a chalk line? Sure it would...
• "Create a concrete curb by placing the 2x10 form boards around the perimeter of the sand area, about 6 inches higher than the top of the poured concrete. The boards will help keep the concrete from escaping your sand area." – Won't the concrete just leak out under the boards you placed six inches off the ground?
• "Hammer the stakes into the ground at equal intervals (about 12 inches) using double headed nails." – Good thing you're on sand, since those nails make lousy hammers! Idiot!
• "Pour concrete onto the sandy area, keeping it inside the form boards. Allow the concrete to set for three or four days, and then remove the 2x10 form boards." – Shouldn't you, we dunno, finish the wet cement? Float it? Stuff like that? Sure you should, dummy!

Talk about the blind leading the blind... Petty clearly knew jack about pouring concrete before she claimed this title, and even less about the job after she'd finished writing. That's not to mention that some moron "content editor" – perhaps one with a degree in "administration" like Marsanne's – let this Dumbass of the Day-quality material be published. Shame...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_5678319_pour-concrete-sand.html

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