I ran across this when I broke up an old section of concrete around our house. I was wondering why it appears to have 2 layers?
The concrete is probably from the 1950s or earlier. Don’t really know, as I’ve only owned the house for 12 years.
At first I thought they had compacted a layer of gravel then poured an inch or so of concrete on top of that. But the bottom layer is still stuck together somewhat, so it must have SOME concrete in it.
Any ideas?
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Guessin here..the water from the mix, saturated the gravel and such below and locked it all together?
Mixed too wet and all the aggregate settled to the bottom? Or, a quick-fix topping slab when the first slab settled an inch.
'cause that's the way Go....
Opps. Wrong thread!
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Looks like it got a top coat.
This is typical of old concrete basment floors. My house has it as well (1927 Bungalow). Cement was expensive. Crews would lay down a layer of sand and gravel. A topping layer of cement and sand slurry would be poured on top of the gravel and troweled. This results in a VERY hard surface but only about 2 inches thick of hardened cement with slightly cemented gravel underneath. Somewhat easy to punch through. Hard as hell and tough on the saw blades.
I saw a TV show where they showed a DIY installation of flag stone. Later they showed all of the help that this woman had, It was not really DIY in this case.
Anyway they put done a compacted cushed rock "road base". What in my area is called AB#. Then they put down a layer of cement (I think maybe 1/4"0 and sprinkled it.
Then they used a dry cement/sand/water mix to actually set the stones.
Now that we've put that to bed, how 'bout a new concrete question?
;)
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