Ok, now I REALLY need to grow up…

So, Friday, I was standing on the front step, watching the kids playing.  Suddenly, I wasn’t standing on the step anymore, I was standing in the step.

Not something you want to have to deal with on a long weekend.

To be be fair, uh, to the step, I’ve been putting off dealing with it for a little while.  Well, okay, ever since we moved in in 2007.

The step is comprised of a retaining wall, and then the interlock goes between the wall and the house.  There’s a second “porch” area off to the side, and a lower, initial step.  It’s not done the way Mike Holmes would do it, for instance they didn’t actually use retaining wall bricks for the retaining wall, but that’s not what was wrong.

It sounds simple enough but essentially what I’d been putting off doing was leveling the interlock,by removing the bricks, adding stone dust, leveling it out and replacing the bricks.  Doesn’t sound hard,  I mean I’ve seen it done on TV…

But that’s not what was wrong on Friday.  On Friday, part of the step had collapsed, because there was nothing under the bricks.

So, Saturday, I pulled up the bricks, (rather cleverly numbering them so I’d know in which order to replace them) and then assessed the situation.

The void under where I was standing was about 7 inches deep and about 6 inches wide.  I’m still not sure what caused it, but I have m suspicions.  I don’t think it’s a result of water erosion, because it’s next to the house, and well sheltered.  I suspect that it’s likely a result of the installer using anything and everything he could find as fill, including broken bricks, which caused a void, and with time it just shifted.    Also, when the step was installed, the installer (I discovered later) had cut off part of the original cantilevered step, and built on top of it.  I suspect they didn’t close off the space under the step, and the fill eventually spilled under that.  It could have been chipmunks, because while I was doing the work there was a very interested-looking chipmunk hanging around.

Saturday, off to Home Depot I went.  I figured I’d need three bags of stone dust, so I bought five, and one tube of landscape adhesive (there were a couple of bricks in the retaining wall that were loose), so I bought two. Unfortunately, I didn’t need to purchase any power tools .

First hurdle: I knew that one of the top bricks on the retaining wall was going to be an issue. Due to settling, there was a 1/2 inch difference between the part of the retaining wall that was integrated into the original step, and the part that was built on the ground.  And that’s where this particular brick was supposed to go.  I had to remove the next two bricks, then dig down, remove two courses of brick below the bricks in question, prop up one end of it to create a slope (propped up by a brick  was being used as fill that I found,) and then glue them back in place.  Success!

Next up: laying the bed of stone dust.  I knew that the row of bricks next to the house was at more or less the right level, because they were on top of part of the original step and a few inches of stone dust, so I didn’t add anything to that.  I thought I’d be smart and lay string from that row of bricks to the front of the retaining wall, and just filling up the  step with stone dust to the right level, but in the end I didn’t doing that.  I dumped the bag of stone dust, raked it level, tamped it down (I just used my feet, but you can get a piece of plywood, or rent a tamper from the Depot) and then used a 2 x 4 as a screed to get it flat.  Sounds simple, right?  I thought so too.  This was easily the most-time consuming part of the job.   I ended up using two of the five bags of stone dust for this.  The rule-of-thumb I discovered was that if you think you’ve got enough stone dust, you probably don’t.

Finally, I was ready to put the bricks back.  This part was surprisingly easy, and went fairly quickly, but by the time I was done, I didn’t feel like doing the “porch” part of the step, so I left it for the next day.

Sunday, I did the porch part of the step/  Now that I was an interlock guru, it went much more quickly, (I only needed one bag of stone dust) and I was ready for the final part.

The bricks were all in place, but needed to be adjusted slightly to look right.  Once that was done, all that was left to do was to secure the bricks in place by sweeping stone dust into the space between the bricks.  I figured I’d probably only need part of the fourth bag of stone dust, but ended up using the whole thing (see rule-of-thumb, above.)

All in all, I would have much rather done, well, anything else this weekend, but I must say, it feels really good to check this one off the to-do list, and the front step looks great.