The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: asiljoy on August 06, 2020, 12:59:12 PM
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Our backyard is a hot mess of slow moving terrible at the moment.
It's a walkout, terraced, with a 4 ft retaining wall in the middle and had a deck on that terrace (it was all of 18 inches off the ground at it's highest. No, I did not understand its purpose). We live in the city, we're physically close to our neighbors, and there is absolutely no way to get machines back there.
That retaining wall was built around a tree that had to come down after being struck by lightening and split in two a couple years; ever seen a crane pick up a tree? It's kinda awesome. Well, turns out that tree was more or less holding up the retaining wall and then deck as the retaining wall is now tipping over and the deck kinda just slid to the side. When we took the deck off, we found that it had covered a concrete patio made up of six slabs. Two of those slabs have been removed to make room for proper drainage, but the rest of them are in pretty good shape. The 4 8X10 slabs have no cracks at all, they're just not level with each other and present a tripping hazard with the biggest difference being about 1.5 inches between slab heights.
We have some time to make a decision while we work on getting the retaining wall ripped down and rebuilt, again with proper drainage, but I'm trying to decide now so I can budget. I've had two contractors come out to give bids on leveling them out with each other. One wouldn't give me a bid due to the inability to get his machines back there, and then other gave me a bid of 2,500 (it isn't mud jacking, but a polylevel). I'd be happy enough with this if they were level, but seems spendy.
Is that route worth pursing, or do I just bite the bullet and tear it all out? We can't build on top of the existing concrete because it would block the door to the house. My husband and I tore out the first two ourselves over two weekends by renting a jackhammer for $100, sledging what we couldn't get done in the rental period, and about $300 in disposal costs. I just see the paver project ballooning out of control quickly since we can't use machines and it would require a lot of manual labor just to get the supplies back there.
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https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=concrete+pump+truck
If you can break it down and haul it out, you can pump concrete back there and rebuilt whatever you like.