KFI AM six forty. You're listening to Dean Sharp The House Whisper on demand on the iHeart Radio app. Hey, do you know this very program is also the House Whisper podcast that you can listen to anytime, anywhere on demand. Hundreds of episodes, all searchable by topic. It is literally a home improvement reference library just for you. Today's show, this Concrete broadcast with my very special in studio guest Chris Carson, is going to belong and live for a
long long time on the House Whisper podcast. So if you've missed any portion of today's show, about an hour after we go off the air of the live broadcast, it has already been converted into podcast form and it is there waiting for you. Chris is going to tell all his friends, oh, go check out the podcast I was on with the House Whisper, my friend Dean's show, and they'll all go back and they'll listen to him, and then they're going to call him and ras him
do what everything that they do. And if you're thinking, hey, that's all great, what we really need is Dean and Tina standing in our house addressing that thing that we have never been able to figure out. Well, you can do that too. You can book an in home design consult with me and the tea you just go to house whisperer dot design. Okay, Chris, back into this conversation about we were talking about crack control, I want to
switch over. I'm kind of we're ping pong and back and forth when it comes to when it comes to homes and an actual slab on grade house foundations. Most of our listeners are not planning on building a new house right now, but there are I would also say that most of our listeners are not aware that since the nineteen eighties, there are two very distinct kinds of slabs out there that their home may be sitting on.
And if they're thinking about a remodel, if they're thinking about a room edition, or if they're thinking about something as simple as well, we're changing the configuration of the bathroom and I'm thinking about putting the toilet on the other side, and that's going to involve, you know, saw
cutting some concrete and moving a drain. There's something very important for them to understand, and that is that the way you deal with a traditional rebar slab versus a post tension slab very very different, and it's important that we know what the difference is. So why don't you, first of all, I mean, I think everybody understands rebar, you know, it's the traditional thing. Talk to me about post tension slabs. Why are they so great?
Uh?
And also what is their vulnerability?
Post tension is a way advanced reinforcing method that we have now the good the post tension and it's a cable wrapped in a heavy plastic sleeve and this cable runs through it and it is attached to each you know, each end of the form. If it's a square, it goes both ways. And after you pour, you come and hydraulically tension that cable up to a certain percent. It's fresh concrete, so you won't go to its max PSI.
But what it's doing it's pulling. You know, this cable is stretching and stretching, pulling this concrete together, eliminating the possibility of separation and cracks. And then after it comes up to so many days of the PSI getting to where it needs to be, then they come in and do the last post tension tightening. And that's mostly on the newer homes I've been starting to do it on the sports courts, in the town basketball courts, tennis courts, there is a minimum of six inches thick on a
post tension slab. Huge, huge gainers in the respect that you don't need all these control joints that we've been talking.
About, because that that concrete has been pushed together on itself so tight hydraulically, just that it is just solid and so like on a sport or like a basketball court, you don't want to but I'm dribbling, I don't want a bunch of crack control joints under me because it's just you know, I just want it nice and smooth. But that's a big slab. To have no crack control.
Joints, well, they usually put one down the middle of a tennis quarter basketball court, surety one in the middle, But there's no way you can put score marks ten foot on center.
It just it just messes up the point of the thing signed the layout. Okay, So so in case you're still kind of wondering, so instead of this uh these rigid uh bits of rebar half inch diameter rebar being tied together in grids all over the house before the slab is poured, a post tension slab has these cables strung through it. Uh and uh, and those cables stretch out and and drill through the sides of the forms.
They hang out with Oh sorry, I did not mean to bunch the more you know, buttons, But now I know more. Yeah, now you know more? Right andrew yep. So they hang out of the edge of the of the forms, and then we pour. And then as that concrete is setting up, then we put hydraulic equipment on the outside and grab those cables. Essentially, but think of it this way. Instead of rigid steel in your slab, we we we're gonna run guitar strings through your slab. Okay,
steal guitar cable strings and uh. And after the concrete is placed, we're gonna crank those knobs and we're gonna tighten those guitar strings. We're gonna tune the guitar until they are tight.
Uh.
And under tension post post poor post meaning not a post sticking up in the sky, but after the poor meaning post tension. We put tension on the concrete after the poor And so a traditional rebar slab has no tension on it. It's just the bar is in there, and it's helping to reinforce the brittleness of the concrete. But this extra pressure and tension really helps the cement hold itself together.
Totally totally different than rebar. Rebar. It's a myth people think I'm going to put a bunch of rebar in this lab to keep it from cracking. Rebar does not keep concrete from cracking. It's going to crack. It's not a post tension. It's not something that's hydraulically, you know, brought up to a PSI. It's like, you know, concrete with post tension, it's like a vice. You know, you put the concrete and a vice and you tighten it. That's the way it is forever.
So now post tension, it's realistic to say we're keeping the concrete from cracking exactly truly, but post tension when it comes to future work, has an achilles heel. We need to talk about that literally, an achilles heel. I think that's actually a really good metaphor for it. We're going to discuss. So go nowhere. We're going to talk about this on the other side of the break. If
you don't know, here's the critical thing. If you don't know whether you've got a post tens slab or not, you got to find out before anybody touches that concrete. So hang with me. Yeah, did I tease you enough?
Good?
Hang tight.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM six forty.
At your service. Thanks for joining us on the program. We are talking all things concrete today with my special in studio guest Chris Carson, and so we were talking about before the break to a traditional slab slab on grade for a house is done with rebar, a reinforcement bar tied with I think everybody knows what rebar looks like.
And if you've ever seen a pore before it happens, you see it's all tied together in a grid of some sort and people wonder how close and what kind And there's no universal answer to that, all right, It really it's an engineering thing. The size of the rebar
I can tell you. Typically the size of a rebar for a residential slab on great house is usually what we call number four rebar, which is a half inch rebar, and it's usually tied somewhere in the area of eighteen to twenty four inches on center, you know, eighteen to twenty four inch squares, and Chris is nodding his head, so I know I'm telling you the right thing, and
that's you know. And plus then there are extra bits of rebar at the bottom of the bottom of footings and the top of footings, and what we call grade beams, and there's just and pads for structural posts, and on
and on it goes. The other kind of slab that has been more and more utilized started off on kind of exclusively on the high end, and then more developers started using it later on, starting in the eighties, would be a post tension slab, which before the break we were saying uses cables that are tightened after the fact. Those A post tension slab, because of the nature of its structure, doesn't need as much stuff in it. In other words, you don't find post tension slabs at eighteen
inches making eighteen inches square grids with these cables. Most of the time. It's three to four foot apart from each other in general. That's but my experience. You can correct me if I'm wrong about that, Chris, But it's about three to four feet on center. But right before the break. You know, I teased you a little bit and said, a post tension slab for all of its immense benefits. I mean we're talking essentially a crack proof
slab without any control joints in it. It has an achilles heel, and the achille heel is very simply this. You can work. You can remodel and work around a post tension slab butt unlike a traditional slab, where I can just go in with a concrete saw and make cuts and cut through rebar if I need to. Because if I cut open a pad of a concrete and I've cut out a section of rebar, then I can turn around and dowl in to the side of that old cut with some epoxy, some new rebar, and remake
the pad and retie it in. But if we cut a post tension cable, one of these high tension cable that's running across, it not only affects that cut right there, but it affects the structural stability of the slab along the entire length of that cable. Not only it could be a dangerous thing as well, but most importantly, ultimately, putting the danger side across, you can you can mess up an entire section of your slab.
You can. I'd say the danger part that you were mentioning would be the more concerning problem if you lost a cable. You have so many cables in there. Without one cable, you're going to be okay, this slab is not going to fail. But it's a very dangerous thing to not know you have a post tension slab and to cut into it. I'm sure people have been hurt. Seriously. It explodes because of all the tension in the cable.
When you cut it, it basically explodes. And you're only talking a cable that's in a six inch piece of concrete and it's not it's not something that you want to get involved with. To prevent that. We x ray slabs and lay it all out on the top of the slab before you know, you have to get in to do maybe a plumbing repair or an electrical problem, So you need to be aware. A lot of times they'll have a stamp in the girl that we'll say post tension foundation. I don't always see them there, but
that's what they used to do. But there might be signs on the side of the stem walls, the sides of the walls of the foundation that show the cups and how they're mounded, unless they're stuccoed over. But it's good to know if you have post tension slab or not, and you've got a problem with your house, you need to dig into it. You better know what you.
Got exactly now. Again not to say there's really there aren't any limits to what you can do with a post tension slab versus the standard slab as far as making alterations and so on. It really just comes down to this, You've got to know where the cables are and you don't cut them right. Apart from that, we can go in and do In fact, we can expose a cable, a section of cable. We can cut around it very carefully. We can expose a section of cable.
We can get in there and do all sorts of stuff and put it all back, and there are processes for all that. But we don't cut the cables because
that can be problematic on a number of levels. So know what you've got, And if you're just sitting there, you know, not doing any work on your house, No, you don't have to go find out what you got tomorrow, because it doesn't matter right, and the house of the house, you're just gonna know that you've got a house that's never had any uplift and no cracks in the slab and so on. And if it's a house after built after the eighties, there's a good chance that it might
be a post tension house there. But any work in which anybody is talking about doing anything with that concrete slab, you've got to know ahead of time. And it's it's only you know, you know, a few dollars I mean talking about a few hundred dollars to have a location service come out. And these guys specialize in this. The same guys that find, you know, broken water lines under your home and so on, can come out and X ray and scan your slab and literally, like Chris said,
put down tape marking like here it is. You know, if the bear slab, they can paint it for you, but they can roll tape around to cross and show you right here here, you know, within an inch or two, here is where this cable is, and here's where that cable is. And then you just make sure that everybody avoids them, you know, so that so that we don't end up with something disastrous on our hands, all right, Chris,
So I want to keep rolling here. I've got just enough time to tease the next segment blameing the structural slab aside. I want to get back into the esthetic stuff. And we've talked about cracks, and we've talked about the proper way. We've talked about the ideal, the situation for pouring and all of that, and maybe we can touch a little bit more on that some other weather conditions that are problematic. But I want to talk about finishes,
your favorite finishes and your least favorite finishes. Now, why should that matter to me? I'm a designer and I'm just going to give my clients the finish they want. But the fact the matter is some finishes perform better than others in the long term. Some finishes promise a lot and in my opinion, end up delivering far less than what they promise. So I want everybody to hear from you, from your vast experience, the kind of concrete finishes that you like the most, sand finish, broom finish,
stamped concrete, exposed aggregate. What are these things, how do they work? And in your experience, which are the ones that really hold up to everything they promise and what falls short. We will talk about that right on the other side of the news.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI Am six forty.
You are home. I hope you feel home. That's my goal. Your Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisperer. We spend every minute of this program every weekend on Saturday mornings from six to eight and Sundays from nine to noon talking about your home. It's design. We talk about it all the way from its architecture down to the nitty gritty of home repair, home construction, inside, outside, the whole thing.
It's all about your house and your home and taking your ordinary house and turning it into hopefully an extraordinary home. One of the most basic and fundamental elements, whether it's in the slab itself or in the outside decorative flatwork, is concrete. Concrete is just simply one of the most important things that we do on planet Earth, and one of the biggest things that we do. It's been a great show so far. We're turning the corner around eleven thirty here and I have in studio with me my
very special guest, Chris Carson. Fantastic Concrete and masonry contractor. And we've been talking all things concrete, So Chris, now let's get back out into the decorative side of things. As I said before the break, from a design perspective, we have a lot of options for finishes of concrete, and as a designer, there are so many options that it might be tempting if I wasn't anchored in the builder side of me, to just say yes to anything
that a client is looking for. But there are finishes that I've encountered over the years that I like definitely better and worse when it comes to concrete. And I'm interested from your perspective if there are finishes that you like for better or worse. And it's not that Chris's taste or my taste should determine your taste, but you should listen to some experts who have some serious experience with it in terms of maybe that finish is not
going to follow through with everything that it's promising. So I would love to hear from you, what, by the way, what so, what is your favorite concrete finish? I think most people have seen all of them, whether they realize it or not. Probably not, but most people have encountered all the finishes. They just may not know what it is that they're looking at. But what's your favorite finish for?
Right? We have so many options now. The thing that you need to look at it also is the longevity of the looks, whether or not it's going to fade, and what's going to happen in the future with this
type of finish you've created. There's finishes now, an exposed agg again and finish, a sand finish that those involve a chemical that we put on and wash off the next morning and expose Maybe a sand finish would be exposing the very top layer of the concrete into a porous sand finish, and then you can go deeper into that into the aggregant. That is a look very popular is the stamp. Stamp colored finishes. Those to me and after doing this all those years, I come back and
look at them underneath the patio cover. They look beautiful. With the colors put out in the sun. They're faded. People want to know what can I do? This looks terrible. It's all watched out For that reason alone, right there, I would tend to stay away from the stamp and the coloring. Sometimes it works on a house, or sometimes
you have it and you have to match it. But to come back and put a sealer on it and recolor, you're going to be married to that and it's going to be a constant thing, moving furniture, pressure watching, ceiling coloring. Where a sand finish and other types of finishes don't require anything you come back in ten years. They look just like that, you know, other than your just standard broom finishes. But people want options with their house. They
want something that looks good. They want to put in a new backyard, a new back patio, definitely put in a kicked up finish. There's so many alternatives, but you want something that you aren't going to come back in five or eight years and go goud. It's all getting bleached out, but it looks great under the cover. Right, I didn't finished, is my answer to your question.
All right, so I knew you were gonna rag on stamped concrete because here is the thing I think my experience has been in working with most homeowners that I think right now, most of our listeners would prior to this conversation, at this moment right here, would assume that a stamped concrete finishes the pinnacle of concrete finishes, and what y'all are not aware of is within the industry itself, it is the finish that makes most of us roll our eyes the most because of everything that Chris just
talked about. Well, so let me talk from a design perspective. From a design perspective, stamped concrete is usually not my first go to, never my first go to at all, for a couple of reasons. One, it is an attempt to emulate another material, and as a designer, I would rather just use the other material. In other words, a stamped concrete is trying to look like a cobble, or it's trying to look like a flagstone, or it's trying to look like some kind of a natural stone finish.
So we have the stamps, and we have the mats, and we press in and we emboss the top of the concrete, and then if we really want to go to the nth degree, there are powders and color additives that are put on the surface that affect the surface color to try and get that stony two or three tone finish, and believe me, it can be done beautifully.
I've seen Chris's stuff look beautiful. But the point is every one of those additional elements can react differently to time, to UV, light from the sun, uneven, fading and blotching and all, I mean, just all sorts of stuff. So it really the big secret is within the industry, it's the least desired finish within the industry.
And now also with pavers, they seem to be quite popular for many reasons. Just talking about the color with pavers, it's so dense. Pavers don't have the qualities of concrete. They don't fade as much in pavers. The colors, You're going to get a lot more time out of your pavers with the color almost no problem. I haven't seen pavers completely fail with their colors make a stamp concrete.
And also the pavers another benefit. Hey, if you've got a tree root that grows underneath your driveway sad lab and it's all lifted, you pull the papers up, you put them back down, you take the roots out. You never know anything that happens pavers. You know what, within the last ten fifteen years, you're starting to see a lot more people doing pavers. They've been around for a while,
but now they're starting to make more sense. With trees, which you're in getting bigger trees are our number one caused tree roots probably most concrete crackings.
So absolutely a no brainer. If you're thinking about a concrete driveway that is supposed to emulate cobble, then just do it in pavers. Because you talk about papers been around for a long time. Pavers are as old as paving gets because essentially a modern day concrete paver is the modern version of cobblestone. I mean, and what are the advantages? As Chris said, these are individual units. Now
we're back to that definition of masonry. These are individual units that are going into a driveway or a patio, and if anything ever needed to be dealt with underneath, we can literally unzip those units, set them aside, get underneath, do whatever needs to be done, cut that tree root, move that sewer line, and then literally put them back into place again. And there's no cracking in a paver or driveway because as the settling or whatever minute things happen,
they just it's absorbed in all of those joints. And so that's another reason why stamped concrete is just not necessary on this level. So it may come as a shock to everybody to find out that we're not big fans of stamp concrete. But hopefully it's it's an educational one because down the line the problems with fading and modeling and all of the above. Now you said you like a sand finish, I love a sand finish. I
also love exposed aggregate. I want to explain that process a little bit clearer for everybody so that they understand that. I think we're just going to have enough time to do that before we are out today. So hold tight if you want to hear how and why these are far more reliable and I think more beautiful finishes. Number one, you already know that I've showed my hand because I think if we use concrete, let's just not hide it. Let's use concrete, and let's use concrete in its most
beautiful forms. Otherwise, if we want a flagstone driveway, let's buy some flagstone right and just make a flagstone driveway. It'll hold up much better than a stamped version of flagstone long term. But if we're the other advantage of a beautifully finished concrete driveway is they're not that expensive to achieve. No, I mean we're talking of sand or an aggregate exposed aggregate finish. It's just a couple extra steps. We're going to be done that day at the same time. Yeah, so, yeah,
you have some chemic goals. You have some release or whatever it's going to be to retard that concrete so we can wash it to get the effect that we want, but not that much effort to make concrete look different. It's all going to be done, you Port seven. It's all gonna be done at twelve one o'clock. I don't care what what we're gonna do. You're gonna have You're gonna have your concrete at the end of the day, and we're gonna be out of your hair all right.
When we come back, we're gonna explain how that particular set of finishes work. Uh uh, and we're gonna wrap it up.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI A M six forty.
Here we are final segment of the show. But don't go anywhere because I am taking this content all the way to the very end because there's so much, you know, and we have just scratched the surface on the subject of concrete today. We didn't even get into masonry per se. Uh and we're gonna have to come back Chris and do that another day with me. Is that okay with you? All Right? Everybody's loving you on the show. We're getting we're getting calls and emails and it's just been great.
So uh, we kind of spent the last segment pooh poohing stamped concrete. Uh you know, not that it doesn't have its place in a certain place, but you and I both would you know, as builders and as a designers, we would rather go in different directions with concrete. I'd rather let concrete be concrete and let it be amazing.
It's kind of like back when we used to foe our walls in our living room, right, Yeah, that was in That was huge. Yeah. I used to do it too. I mean, I mean how many years ago was that? Fifteen twenty years? It stated, Maybe it's kind of like stamp concrete in a way.
Yeah. I think I just think materials if I think you can take a material and from a design perspective, take it as many places as it can go itself, and you discover all new realms to it instead of just the assumption, well concrete is just gray and boring. But hey, guess what we learned to do. We learned to stamp it and turn it in and make it look like something yeah yeah, but not right. And so anyway, on the side object of this, there are a series
of finishes that you and I both love. A sand finish, an exposed aggregate finish, and a process called seeding. And I'm just gonna set it up here and then you can get in and correct me or make the specifics. But essentially what we're talking about is both a sand finish and exposed aggregate finish and seeding is we are.
What we're doing is we're pouring a regular poor floating a regular poor It looks, you know, at the end of the day, it pretty much looks like we've just left behind a flat, old, you know, boring, normal concrete job. But right at the end because of something we've put into the concrete, either the size of specialized aggregate stones or a sand in bedmont in the top or seeding.
What you're gonna explain a second. We spray a chemical over the top of that curing concre and it comes in many names, and there are a lot of different ones out there, but we just spray kind of Hudson spray or out of chemical over walk away, walk away. Usually come back unless weather conditions are making us do otherwise. Usually come back the next morning and pressure wash that material off. And what that chemical does in one way or another, it's a retardant in terms of it keeps
that top little layer of the cement from curing. Okay, well, everything else is curing and hardening up, that one is
staying vulnerable. And under the pressure of a pressure washer, we blast away that very top layer of concrete and expose the hidden treasure underneath, which is this embedded finish of either sand, which is a beautiful smooth finish, or the aggregate like the pea gravel aggregate that's in the mix of the concrete itself, or what you've seeded into the concrete the day before, which takes it to a whole different level. And talk about what seeding is.
Yeah, we can keep going with this thing. Seating is a process where there's material shops now that just sell different types of rock or granite or glass or pearl or abalone shells. We take this stuff and we actually, like bird seed, we spread it onto the concrete at
the right time after it's in our finishing process. Effort starts to get a little bit tight, and we just throw this on like bird seed, all through the whole top, almost solid, and then we floated in, get that cement over it and get it attached to the aggregant that we've installed, so it's going to here, and then we apply a chemical and the next morning we wash it and it's all all the aggregant is left, but the cement is washed out.
Now, if you live in eastern Ventura County, and I'm going to describe this sort of makes sense to everybody. If you live in southern California, you know that years ago, I was twenty eighteen, I want to say, was the Borderline mass shooting at the Borderline Club out here in Thousand Oaks. Afterwards, our local park in Naho Creek North commissioned a memorial for all of those who were lost
who lost their lives in the Borderline shooting. Chris is the one who actually put that memorial together, designed and put that memorial together. There are large granite boulders, one for each of the individuals who lost their lives at the Borderline, and then out in the field there are pavers of people who have signed the backs, and you know, it's a very very intimate, very very meaningful thing in
between the pavers and the boulders. The boulders are skirted with cement with concrete, and Chris didn't want just another color element entering into it. He wanted something to blend. And so we have these large like you know, granite like you know, river boulders, and so Chris seeded that band of cement with granite flex down it went, poured
the concrete, put on the chemical release agent. Left next morning pressure washed it off, and now those granite boulders are surrounded by these aprons of looks like more granite, more granite. It's like a seamless match between the granite boulder and the granite concrete until we get to the actual dedication pavers. It is beautiful, it is gorgeous, and it's concrete. Yeah, and it's the kind of stuff that
can be done with concrete these days. I think it's just a stunning example of exactly So that's a good example of seating. Right. So you're pouring out the concrete per us, and right as you're starting to float in the finish, when it's time to you know, and then you're gonna be sprinkling like Bert, you know, just casting out all of this stuff. And it's not superficial. You're embedding it down. You're kind of trowling it down in for floating is what we call. But we're embedding it
in the concrete. And then that chemical release agent is going to allow us the next morning to re expose it. And it doesn't come off and it doesn't wear. It's granted, yes, that's not gonna color fade over time. That's not a die or a powder or anything. It's more stone on the cement. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. And by the way, that was just an absolutely beautiful job.
Chris, thank you.
All right, everybody, here we are at the end of another three hours. Man, does it blow by?
Yes?
I will have Chris back on, and yes, the next time I have him on, and we'll do it. Not long from now. We'll be talking specifically about masonry. We're gonna talk about brickwork and all of that kind of stuff. Okay, just all of that fun stuff as well. But here we are at the end of another program. I only have just a brief wish for you today, not a long closing thought because I wanted all of our material to get out so that we made it through. It's
very simply this. You know, we talked about letting a material be what it is. There is something honest about really good design in that sense. Yeah, I love playing tricks on people. I will fake something when we need to fake it. And my general rule is the further something is away from your critical perspective, the more you're allowed to fake it, because nobody can get right up close to it and discover that it's not real. But that's not how life works. That's not how people work.
You know, we live right next to each other, and for our closest friendships and our biggest relations ships and the ones that we depend upon, like the concrete under our homes that hold our lives up. You know, what it needs to be real and real does not mean boring. But the best thing that we can do, you and I in our lives is to find the most beautiful form of us that we can find the most beautiful versions of us. And you know, instead of trying to fake it, make the most out of what you are.
I like making the most out of concrete and leaving it concrete, and I want you to make the most out of what you are and you will shine in the exact same way, in your own, unique and beautiful way. And I think that resolution is the beginning of you building yourself a beautiful life. Everybody, Enjoy the rest of this Sunday, Enjoy the week ahead, and we'll be here
next weekend. And guess what's coming up next weekend. We'll be talking about the best of the International Builders Show, which is taking place this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. Huge show, so much to talk about. Both shows next weekend. Dedicated to all the little nuggets that I find along the way. You're not going to want to miss it in Until then, enjoy the day. We'll see you next week. This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper.
Tune into the live broadcast on KFI AM six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.