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Last Updated: Monday, May 10th, 2010, Created: Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

Weather Restrictions: Concrete - site mixed or delivered.

. WEATHER & RENOVATION is a joint project of: CTV.ca and JonEakes.com designed to help you plan home improvement projects around weather restrictions. If you have just been checking the weather for your project on the CTV web site -- welcome to JonEakes.com where you will find all the details for your home improvements. If you started here and are looking for weather restrictions related to home improvements, follow this link to CTV.ca where you can get your local weather forecast together with weather restrictions for specific products  on the bottom of the page.

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Concrete is often a poorly understood product. First CEMENT and CONCRETE are not synonyms. Cement is only the glue that holds sand, stone and whatever else is in a particular concrete mix together. Concrete gets hard and strong not by drying but by "curing" -- a chemical process that requires water. Concrete should not be allowed to dry out on the surface for at least 3 days and in fact it will not reach its full strength for 28 days. Concrete should not be smoothed out too much or you weaken the top surface -- pushing all the large rocks down and bringing up all the fine material to the top. Strong concrete is a good mix of all those different particle sizes. Concrete is very strong under compression -- and very week under shear or tension forces. You can't crush a concrete paving stone but you can easily crack it. If you put too much water into the mix, it flows more easily but it will surely develop shrinkage cracks. So to build with concrete you have to understand the nature of its strengths, weaknesses and shrinkage -- keeping all unnecessary water out of the mix and sometimes adding steel reinforcement before you pour. Concrete surfaces outdoors are easily prone to "spalling", bits and pieces popping off. It would be a good idea to read the database entry on CONCRETE IN A COLD CLIMATE. Searching the database on the keyword CONCRETE will yield a lot of related information.

Keywords: Basement, Concrete, Cracks, Decks, Driveway, Foundation Membrane, Garage, Joints, Landscaping, Outdoors, Paving, Porch, Products, Renovation, Rock, Sand, Shrinkage, Slab-On-Grade, Spalling, Stairs, Stone, Walkway, Water, Weather

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