Quikrete Quick Fixes

We noticed that we had a lot of ants crawling around the edge of our house and when we traced their path, we saw that they were passing through tiny cracks in our concrete near the garage. Quikrete to the rescue! Do you know about this stuff? (Editing to add: this is Quikrete Hydraulic Cement, specifically. Not some other kind of variety of goop made by Quikrete, of which there are several.)

Quikrete is cool. My parents showed us a while back how awesome it is at fixing mortar and paving work but we never had a chance to get back out and try it for ourselves until recently. All the work we did with this (well, mostly D; as usually I just took pictures) only took about 20 to 30 minutes and was dry to the point of invisible by the next morning (probably sooner, but I didn't go back out and look). All it takes is a disposable cup, a stirrer of some sort (we use twigs, kabob sticks, popsicle sticks, etc), and some water.

The work we did to fix the ant problem actually didn't come out well in photos, so I'll show you another problem we solved thanks to Quikrete. While we had it out to deal with the ant holes, we decided it was about time to fix the mortar around our stone walkway, which had a lot of missing pieces that accumulated water and grime. Here's a couple of examples:

So we got down to work. The hardest part about Quikrete is figuring out how much water to add to get to the right consistency (it probably says so right on the bucket but where would be the fun in that?). So we took a little mix and a little water and mushed it together. We added a little more of each as necessary until we got a nice putty. Then it's time to act fast, because Quikrete, like the name implies, dries really quickly.

The key, as my parents taught us, was to work in small batches. So we didn't mix all of it at once, just enough for each crevice.

Here you can see the wet Quikrete right next to some of the broken up pieces that we managed to pry out:

Here's some more:

The color was a little dark because the Quikrete was still drying, but as I mentioned above, by the next day I couldn't even tell the difference between the new stuff and the old stuff. We had a lot of success using Quikrete on the mortar between the bricks around our basement windows, too, though I don't have photos.

OK, I'm done extolling its virtues. I promise I wasn't paid or anything. But yeah, this stuff is pretty great!