Install a Trench Drain Video 6 of 7

I wanted to show you what to do how to get the concrete

screated and how to get it pretty close to being finished. And all I'm using is just a little block of wood

This is a little 2 by 3. One of the things I did to make it work out really well is I took a rough piece of sandpaper

and I kind of rounded off these edges so that it's not sharp

But all you do is this is I'm putting the end of the piece of 2 by 2

at the edge of the drain and the other end just sits on top of the form right here on the edge

And I just kind of scrape it along, making sure that any excess concrete does not go into the drain

So, you know, you can bring it up this way. Or since we haven't filled this up here, you would naturally want to go this direction

So we could just do this. And if you angle the board like this, it'll act like a snow plow so that that you'll act like a snow plow

so that the concrete tends not to go down into the drain

You can see how easy that is. Just like that And notice as I pat the concrete you can see all the stones here

Look over here. What we're trying to do is we're trying to drive those stones a little deeper into the concrete mix

so that we just have sand and Portland cement at the top. at the top and by patting it like that it achieves that goal but you can see

the concrete's pretty wet and it's very plastic and it's coming over onto the drain. You gotta make sure it doesn't do that because

you know you won't be able to get the drain off if you make a mistake and have

too much concrete over that steel part of the drain you'll never be able to lift this up so you gotta be checking that all the time

and as the concrete starts to get a little harder, it's going to be easier to scrape that off of there

So right now it's kind of wet, it's okay, but you know, in another hour or so

it's going to be really easy to form. So now the job is I'm going to put the rest of the

concrete around I going to get it nice and smooth with this little block of wood and we show you what that looks like as I finishing that up I got all the concrete in place around the trench drain and I want to talk a little bit about concrete and working with it

It's really kind of important. I want to show you something. I made the concrete a little wet on purpose so that I could

demonstrate this to you, and I made sure that I purchased high-strength concrete that has more Portland cement in it

in it so that it's not going to cause a problem. So look at this. So right here, look how fluid

and how the concrete moves around with my finger. So it's very, very plastic right now. And it's too

wet to work with. It's too wet to try to finish. You just have to kind of screed it and get

it close. And then as the concrete starts to hydrate, you know, the hydration chemical reaction

happens where the Portland cement right now is growing trillions and trillions of little tiny microcrystals

That's what makes the concrete go from the liquid or plastic state to the hard state

Well, as it starts to get harder, then I'm going to be able to take a small little piece of wood like this

and work the concrete and get a really nice finish Now you may wonder why I not using a steel trow you know a big old tool like you see concrete finishers use

Believe it or not, little pieces of wood like this they actually make wood floats, they work really, really well

and this is such a small area that that that trial, the big trow would be just too much tool

So believe it or not, just a little block of wood will work great in a situation like this and you'll see that as we start to

swirl it around once the concrete gets harder. So you probably have a little block of wood

around your house like this. You don't need to go out and buy an expensive trowl and it's going to put on a really, really good finish. The concrete's in. It's getting harder by the

minute. And I just wanted to show you the technique of how you can use the little block of

wood like this to get a nice sandy finish on your concrete. Watch this. So you can see the

The concrete's here. It's a light touch. I'm just letting it float over the concrete and I'm just swirling it around

And it just, you can see how it looks. That's a nice finish right there. That's all it has to be

You don't have to do much more