If you have broken concrete by your garage door or somewhere in your garage, congratulations. You’re part of a club no one wants to be a member of.
The good news is the dues for this club are not as high as you might think.
In other words, broken concrete by a garage door is easily fixable. Plus, you don’t need a bunch of expensive tools or know-how to do it.
That will all help, for sure, but you don’t need them.
You will need the following:
mason mix*
Portland cement*
water
bucket
small brush
a small disposable container (soup can size is perfect)
scrap wood or yardstick, if a straight-line guide is needed
gloves
concrete float or trowel or something flat to smooth your patched concrete
*You can use concrete instead of mason mix and Portland cement. In fact, this is often preferable due to its strength. I explain in Step 2 the very specific reason why we aren’t using concrete.
Here’s how we fixed the broken concrete by our garage door.
Step 1: Prep the area to be patched.
Remove the broken concrete. Sweep up or blow away dirt and debris.
You will need to wet the area down too. You can do that now or later.
Step 2: Mix together mason mix, Portland cement, and water to make mortar.
Woah. Why aren’t we using concrete?
Well, we could. You could too. It just has aggregate (gravel) in it and we were patching such a small spot that we didn’t want to try to smooth out a rough, aggregate-filled mix of concrete over a small area. That’s why we are adding Portland cement into the equation – to give strength.
You can follow our instructions and substitute the Portland cement/mason mix for concrete.
You’ll want to use a 10:1 ratio of mason mix to Portland cement.
If you’ve never purchased these items before, don’t worry. I’ve got you covered with a visual reference. The bag with the green label below is mason mix by Quikrete. The grey and yellow bag on the bottom right of the below picture is Portland cement. (Ignore the 3 stacked bags – that’s for another project.)
Portland cement is going to add strength to your mason mix. A regular bag of concrete already has Portland cement mixed into it to give it strength. If you decide to go the bagged concrete route instead of the bagged mason mix route, you don’t need to add Portland cement.
We were patching such a small area that it was easy enough to mix this up in a bucket using a scrap piece of wood to stir it. You could certainly use a mixing attachment on a drill to mix everything up though.
Only add enough water to make the mix a playdough consistency. You need the mix to stay where you put it. Plus, the less water you add, the stronger the finished product will be.
Working quickly so that your mortar doesn’t set up in the bucket, move on to the next steps.
Step 3: Wet the area
Wet the area that needs to be patched. This will help the mortar or “new concrete” stick to the old.
We didn’t have a hose nearby, so we applied the water with a brush from a bucket of water.
Step 4: Brush on a Portland cement slurry.
Do not skip this step! It’s key to helping the mortar patch adhere to the old concrete.
Mix up a runny mix (like a melted milkshake) of Portland cement and water.
Apply it with a small brush (we used a toothbrush) only to the area that needs to be patched. You don’t want it to dry, so move quickly to the next step.
(If you’re going the concrete route, you’ll be making a concrete slurry instead of a Portland cement slurry.)
Step 5: Patch the broken area with your mortar.
Please note that because our broken section was right where the garage door closes, we had to put a stick of scrap wood down to act as a guide. The stick is held in place with rocks. This way, we’d have a clean edge when our patched concrete dried.
Using your hands or a trowel, pack the mortar into the area that needs to be patched. Pat it down with your fingers to make sure there aren’t air bubbles.
Below you can see that this mortar is almost like a playdough – it’s so thick that his fingerprints are showing where he pressed it in place.
It is helpful to have a concrete float or at least a trowel or something with a flat surface to smooth the top of your mix. Your fingers are not going to cut it to blend the patch with the old concrete.
Once it is smooth, you can move to the next step. You’re almost done!
Step 6: Make sure the garage door closes.
If your patched area is right where the garage door closes, like ours was, you should probably check and make sure the door can still close.
There are likely different and better ways to do this than what we chose.
I’m not necessarily recommending this because of the risk factor, but I will tell you what we did. We covered our patched area with parchment paper and then closed the garage door to check that it could close. It felt a little risky since parchment paper is not designed for this use!
Whatever method you decide to use, don’t leave the garage door closed. Immediately open it back up and let the concrete patch set up and dry with the garage door open.
You can close the door when it is dry, but it won’t cure for a week or longer, so be careful about driving over it until it has fully cured.
P.S. You can see in the above photo that we decided to patch a little more than we originally intended because there was a gap where we thought mice might be able to enter under the closed garage door. We have plenty of problems without mice being able to get in through a closed garage door.
Step 7: Pat Yourself On The Back
Congrats! You are no longer a member of the Broken Concrete Club!
You made your house look AND function better while saving yourself a pile of money. You deserve a cold one for that effort!
Broken concrete is not only an eyesore, but it can be a safety hazard too.
I hope this tutorial was helpful to the less than one percent of you who probably have this problem.
If you have questions about the process, let me know! Please leave a comment on this blog post, email us here, or reach out via Instagram or Facebook.
Happy DIYing.
Thanks for hanging out with me today for this uber-specific tutorial. If you’d like another blog post to read, I can help out with that.
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