Patching Concrete
2007.07.07
The stud walls that used to be in the back room of the basement were attached to the concrete foundation walls via nails that had been driven in with a powder-actuated nailer. (This tool basically uses a .27 caliber cartridge to fire the nail into place.) When we demoed the walls, some of the nails came out peacefully, but most of them took a chunk of concrete with them, leaving dished-out holes all over the walls.
So today I used some vinyl concrete patching to fill the holes. It comes as powder in a plastic bucket, and you add water to mix it up. The key is to get it workable without being so soupy that it won’t stick on the wall.
I used a small masonery trowel, and after some trial and error, decided the best technique was to get a glob of it on the back of the trowel, slap that into the hole, and then smooth it out.
The process inevitably drops lots of the grey goop on the floor. After doing the south wall, I laid down some newspapers to catch most of the slop along the west wall.
Electrical Demo