Ramping Up

It's an uphill battle. We started making a ramp from the sidewalk to our backyard five years ago, and today we're still working on it.

Back in 2010 when we moved in, there was a set of rough steps from the backyard down to the street. They were just packed mud held together with some rotting wooden boards. It wasn't pretty, or very safe, and I'm sure the person who created the steps didn't expect them to last more than a few months. But years later, here we are.

Kathy and I decided back in 2013 to dig out the mud steps and smooth it into a ramp. How hard can it be, right? So we dug and we filled and we measured, and we re-dug, and so on until we got more or less the ramp we wanted. Nice! Now it was much easier to roll the garbage cans out to the curb instead of bumping them down the steps. It was also a lot easier to bring stuff up, like when we bought a new refrigerator. The ramp was especially useful once we started outfitting the downstairs commercial kitchen. No way that giant range would have come up those old muddy steps!

As an added bonus, the house is now wheelchair-accessible. It's not strictly ADA-approved, but it definitely works, and it's much better than anything that was here before.

But a mud ramp is still a mud ramp, so we "paved" it with rubber tiles. Home Depot had some outdoor tiles made from recycled rubber, and they were exactly half the width of our ramp, so two of them side by side fit perfectly. So we bought a couple dozen and flopped them down into the dirt. Much better.

Except that when it rained, the mud washed over the brand new tiles. And when it rained hard, it would make channels under the tiles and undermine the whole thing. By the middle of winter, the ramp was a muddy mess again. So what's Plan B?

We decided to pour a layer of concrete under the tiles to harden the surface and prevent rainwater from washing everything away. That meant lifting up all the tiles, digging out a few inches of dirt, putting down chicken wire to reinforce the concrete, and then mixing and pouring the concrete -- on a slope. Be sure to mix it thick or it will all run downhill.

Once that was done, we flopped all the rubber tiles back in place. Ta-da!

Now we've got a new problem. The tiles slip and skid on the new concrete surface, so we need a way to hold them in place. After experimenting with a few different adhesives, we settled on one that seems to work bonding rubber to concrete, doesn't wash away in the rain, and doesn't smell too terrible. (Well, two out of three.)