Pressdog.com

Is That a Crack?

By Bill Zahren
(Posted 08/08/00)

I'm fixated on my driveway. Obsessed by it. I spend nights walking over it, studying it. I know the feel of its concrete on my naked knees, the shape of its slope on my (clothed, for now) butt.

And I see gray, polyurethane concrete caulk in my sleep. Five bucks a tube at my local Home Depot. So far I've extruded 10 tubes of the stuff into the seams of my driveway. Down on my hands and knees, wielding the caulk gun, sweating my ass off and praying it doesn't rain -- striking.

I noticed the driveway cracks right away when we toured the house we were thinking of buying about month ago. But I didn't just see cracks, I saw mammoth chasms waiting to gape open and swallow one of my children, bike and all.

I saw the subsoil eroding under my entire house one granual at a time, until one day I'd come home from work and the house would be about 10 feet lower than normal. I'd have to climb in an upstairs window to get in. Who do you think would have to clean that up and go into the crevice after the kids? Not my wife, Rhonda. She'd just give me that look like, "Hey, house maintenance is your deal, Sparky."

So, on the second day in our new house, I went to Home Depot, wondered around for the requisite seven hours trying to find something on my own and then broke down and asked an orange-aproned employee where the concrete caulk was. He led me to the motherload. Caulk everywhere. He handed me the cheaper, latex stuff.

But us veteran concrete caulkers know polyurethane is da bomb. Stays rubbery forever. Sticky as hell. Comes out of the caulk gun like a dream. Been found to cause birth defects in California. It's all about polyurethane these days.

Oh, I had a brief fling with latex. It's user friendly, but you'll be recaulking every few years. I'm paying the extra buck a tube to get the primo stuff. Something that's not so user friendly but plenty weather-hostile. Besides, using the non-latex stuff gave me an excuse to buy rubber gloves. Got a pack of 10. One-size-fits-(most)-all. I like to pull the glove on my right hand like a surgeon, wiggling my fingers and spending a few minutes snapping the latex rubber glove as I pull it into place.

Preparation is key to good home maintenance, and to looking good while you do it. Or so I thought. I ended up looking like some kind of mutant glove-wearing athletic trainer or a caulk gun-wielding burglar. Then you just march out there and lay down a bead. I went through four more tubes of caulk again last night.

The seams cut into my driveway have all popped, opening gaps from one quarter to one-inch wide. Nightmares flash through my brain: erosion, heaving concrete to bust up and replace.

I've been walking around the neighborhood and, frankly, I'm shocked at the lack of driveway caulking. Lots of cracks out there, getting steadily bigger, marching on at a glacial pace until one day you drive into the driveway and everything goes dark as the car falls into what used to be your basement, but now is just a swirling pool of water and some corpses right out of Poltergeist.

I think that's one of the reasons a lot of people here in the suburbs have SUVs. So they can drive over the popped driveway joints longer. You could straddle a foot-wide chasm with those babies.

So I'm about done. Just got a couple tubes worth of caulking to go on the lower seams. I'm currently worried because it rained last night. The label on the caulk, right above "The State of California has found this product can cause birth defects" is "do not use when rain is in the forecast."

Well rain was in the forecast last night, but for north of here. Now it's stormy and crappy out and the DRIVEWAY IS WET, so you can see I'll have to do everything I did last night over. I just know it. It only was on there four to six hours before it got wet. I'm screwed.

Oh, Mother Nature is a trickster, she is. She's constantly at war with homeowners. Reminds me of Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall," an essay on which I scored an "A" from Dr. Jan "I'm a Zealot for English" Hodge at Morningside College when I was a freshman.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
(Click here for the whole poem.)

Quoting Frost is always a good move. Chicks dig him. "Woods are lovely dark and deep" and all that.

So the battle lines are drawn. My bank account and willingness to crawl around my driveway for hours, praying it doesn't rain, dispensing toxic crap into cracks versus Mother Nature's wind, rain, heat and cold.

You home owners know. And I'm not counting my friends in California who never have to worry about Nature's atomic weapon -- freezing water. Water gets in your driveway cracks, freezes, expands, and makes the crack bigger and bigger. It's a relentless march to destruction.

My neighbor, who could use some driveway caulk, just put in a new window because the old one was rotted by, yeah, the weather. So I'm checking windows on the afternoon side of my house. I also have a possible drainage situation brewing on the northwest corner of the house. I'll be laying in about 100 pounds of dirt over there ASAP.

And the deck. Don't even talk to me about the deck. Waiting to crumble. Sure, it SEEMS in good shape, but I know water, bugs and sun are destroying it one molecule at a time. I can feel it. Better get to Home Depot (total Zahren family spend there so far: $2.3 million) and get some deck preservative.

Home ownership is all about maintenance and maintenance is all about being vigilant. You think mother nature takes a day off? You think she sits around and watches the Vikings on Sunday? No. She's operating in stealth mode, trickling away your foundation or busting up your concrete a hundredth of an inch at a time.

So grab your caulk guns and follow me, boys. We'll keep water on the grass and crops where it belongs and out of our concrete seams and basements.

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