Lumber Dealers Hate This Raised Garden Bed Hack!
[Music] hey guys today I'm going to be making raised garden beds out of something I've never seen used before Tada wait Tada that's right cement backer board sometimes people may just refer to this as dur Rock which is a brand this is wonderboard which is another brand either way these are 3×5 sheets that are a/2 in thick it literally says on it for use in wet dry areas and indooroutdoor use we're going to find out does this work or am I an idiot o o o spoiler alert could be [Music] both one of the great things about cement backer board is that it's easy to work with as long as you're doing straight cuts you can cut it pretty much just like drywall you score one side bend it flip it over and then cut in the seam to get the other side the first planter I'm going to make is for Kim to plant her raspberries in and she just wants that like a foot tall and I'm going to work with the dimensions that I have on this cement backer board which is 3ft x 5 foot so I'm actually going to make this two foot by 5 foot long but let's come to the first problem with smint backer board you see how flimsy it is because it's not made to take on any weight and I don't know if you can hear that or not but there's some cracking going on so let me get the rest of these pieces cut out and then um we'll see if we can tackle that [Music] issue here in lies the key to either my success or failure in this endeavor that's right construction adhesive power grab I'm using power grab because other construction adhesives can take hours to set where power grab usually sets oh how about that 0 seconds instantly so I really like using this I think when I Bond these two halfin sheets together it's going to take a lot of that Flex out hopefully take almost all that Flex out but we'll find out [Music] [Music] now I won't know how well this works until it's totally set up which is probably tomorrow even though power grab grabs instantly it doesn't fully set up for about 24 hours and if I try to test this too much it's just going to slide on itself so what I'm going to do is set this one to the side let it dry and in the meantime I'm going to go ahead and cut out the pieces so that I can make one more 5ft side and two twt [Music] sides while I'm waiting for those pieces to set up I want to test and figure out how I'm going to put these sides together and one way I'm going to test is I got these galvanized Corner braces or L brackets whatever you want to call it and I have a feeling this isn't going to work but I'm just going to try to put the screws that came with [Music] it not overtighten them to strip it out the thing is this concrete board is very crumbly inside there so doesn't offer a lot of [Music] strength see I can yeah that's what I was afraid of I want to try that one more time this time I'm going to try it with a longer screw and see if that'll make any difference since this is actually going to be doubled up anyway this is more accurate to how it would [Music] be no it's definitely definitely stronger but it's still got that movement there I don't know my backup plan is to use these torque washers and carriage [Music] bolts this would definitely be stronger the only issue is that I don't know if I want to see this on the outside of the planner the reason this works so well is these torque washers dig into the substrate or whatever you're using and then they have that square that matches up with the square on the carriage bolt so that way it locks The Carriage bolt in my sides have set up now and there's a couple spots where it was a little uneven on the brake there so I'm just going to take a grinding stone concrete grinding stone all righty let's mix some concrete for this project I'm going to be using fast Set allr uh by quickr I've never used this before so uh just another part of the experiment okay here we [Applause] go [Applause] man these rocks killing me the mix doesn't have rocks in it it's just that because I left it by the garage door and it got rained on I have all these hard clumps that I thought I could kind of just work through but now I'm not so certain I've let this dry and now I think I'm pretty confident this is going to work while this was drying I red the hardware store picked up another bag or two of all creete so that I have you know because the problem I was having was the rocks from where the rain hit the bag that was causing me a problem and I tried to start out using the TR I thought I would need to really shove this on with the TR that didn't really work so hot uh what worked best was just using my hand um and a pair of gloves what I'm going to do now is set up all the rest of the pieces up here and go ahead and give them a coat on the one side and probably go ahead and put a second coat on this one that is much more like it smooth as butter [Music] one thing I also want to make sure that I do while I'm doing this is fill in the Gap the seam uh between the two pieces Kim just came out here uh and finished what she was doing which is a big help because I got to tell you one thing about working with quick set cement and filming yourself is you feel a little bit like a one leg man in a butt kicking contest so uh lots of glove changing or lots of concrete on the camera I'm just ringing that sponge out almost totally all the water out and then just barely barely touching the concrete so the sides of our concrete rais bed planter are set up but they feel like sandpaper so I'm going over them with this uh grinding stone you don't have to do that but I just don't want it to feel you know super rough like when Kim's working out here uh in this [Music] so I thought I was going to be able to use these stainless steel screws to hold everything together but turns out not that's not going to hold like I thought it did in the test going to have to go with the carriage [Music] bolts [Music] [Music] he's so heavy there we go the original plan for this was this is for Kim's raspberries and the thing is though now that the whole thing is completed um I don't know man what do you think about this I love it so uh so I may end up building a bunch of these to hold all the vegetables we'll have to see this whole area out here beside the house is going to become the Garden area and we're going to put a green house out here and everything these carriage bolts it might even look kind of cool to go back and paint these black I really didn't want these to begin with but Kim actually likes them so I really I really like them and I hope they rust because I really want that old dirty look some people may look at this and say well it' have been easier to have just poured slabs and maybe maybe not but that would not have given Kim the look she wanted she really wanted that old world been there forever look she's probably going to end up smearing dirt on this to make it look older uh and I'm probably going to end up making a bunch more of the