How to Work with Mortar

hey kids great to see you again so uh today's video is actually sponsored by lubriderm uh advanced therapy lotion i've showed you the advanced therapy cream before lubridem's been a great sponsor of me and they make a good product so thank you luberderm for sponsoring this video uh so what i'm gonna show you today is this is a little bit of a tricky video i didn't know what to name it really but it's uh i'm gonna show you how to i'm putting mortar i'm building uh some steps in my backyard out of flat with flagstone and mortar and when you first lay the mortar uh and lay the the flagstone on this in place you use a trowel but then to fine tune it you kind of need to get in some cracks and stuff and i've always done that with just with my fingers because it's just easy to do and you'll see that in the video but uh and then yeah so i'll show you so that's why it's sponsored by lubriderm as well because you'll you'll want to re-moisturize your hands uh when you're all done with this uh so but first before we do it i do have a dad joke for you so what was my dad joke for today i remember uh so why don't you write why shouldn't you write with a broken pencil because it's pointless ah so anyway let's get started all right so here's our flagstone steps that we're in the middle of uh putting in i put in concrete um blocks first and then now i'm just covering them with concrete steps so i'm sorry with flagstone uh on top of the concrete so if you take a look here though so it's been set been setting up for close to a week so you want to be careful you know walking on them you want to make sure that the mortar set so there's mortar in each of these joints here okay see the mortar but as you can see the mortar kind of fell through here when we were doing it but i didn't want to mess with it too much right um one thing when you're messing or when you're putting down mortar on these steps too is you want to make sure this stuff gets cleaned off because it's easy to to leave mortar here and then this ends up it's hard to get hard to get it off so we came out here and gently scrubbed and scrubbed right around the edges you still end up with a little bit but i think we can get the most of it off because uh you know if you're gonna do a if you're doing it quick and you think oh it looks great and then it dries it's hard to get that stuff back off so anyway what i'm gonna do now with the mortar is see this board that i have i'm gonna put that board up underneath here and i'm just gonna put some wedges on it okay and just fill in these cracks with mortar uh the last little bit so that that can dry and then i'll just let that set overnight and then it'll be fine sit up inside inside there okay okay so i just put that board underneath there and i just put a couple wedges underneath too to hold it so that the mud won't fall through there's a little bit of a hole there uh just because things are uneven but that's okay um because i'm gonna mix my mud a little bit thicker so it's not gonna be very runny but i can put it down inside there so for this project i'm just using this little cup here um and just going to mix up just a little bit and just add a little bit of water at a time because i want to keep it the right consistency rather than mix up a big batch because we're just gonna use a little bit okay so that's just about the right consistency right there okay so for this job i'm just gonna actually just use my fingers and kind of work it in there because you want to make sure you don't get it on the sides too okay if you can and we'll just wipe that off see that's a perfect consistency if you if you went thicker it would uh it would fall through or if you went uh runnier i'm sorry if you went runnier it would fall through and we want to make sure to pack that good against here too right because we're trying to make sure that it's all the way down inside there we want that to look look nice and not have a hole there right so i think that's pretty good okay and then we'll come back and kind of clean that up because we want to make sure it doesn't get get dry on your stone otherwise it's gonna be hard to get that off okay okay that's that one you could wear gloves with this too and so i'm going to show you how this ends up drying out your hands you can kind of see it already right there on my fingertips see it's starting to draw the moisture out of my hands let's go ahead and do the one over here too all right so here's this one it's kind of a bigger one on the bottom of it you want to pack it in good right so that it's not just on the surface want to make sure it's kind of pushed down inside there so that it holds you don't want it to just be on the top and then it it's going to end up falling through this one's pretty big here so and then kind of the same thing you want to make sure you clean it off good see if we can push that up there hmm okay i think that looks good okay i'm gonna make my forms for my other ones too i'm just gonna put another board over here on this bottom because i got a good consistency with this and i'm so i'm gonna finish that up all right so i'm putting these up now too underneath here on the risers and you can see there's little gaps where the the pieces fit together so this is a good one too that um you know you could probably wear gloves but i just have found that a finger works uh so much it's just so much easier so i'm gonna do that and then so you end up with the stuff on your on your hands but so you just gotta make sure to use a moisturizer at the end right so but it fills in those gaps and um when you know this is kind of like a in indoors when you're putting up molding if you if you feel those cracks in uh because those your eyes drawn to that right and so by just filling it in and taking that shadow away it's gonna make it look a lot nicer right so we're just gonna fill that in and there's actually some along here too that i'm going to fill in my my uh mud might be a little bit runny for this but i normally like a little bit drier so i'll probably add a little bit more to it but see that it's just so much easier with the finger if i tried to use my trowel it's just hard to get it to look right right so you just got to make sure you clean this up when we're done so that that cement's not sitting on top because it'll be harder to get it off once it's dry see that it just takes that right away so your eyes not drawn to that anymore just to get rid of the shadow do it on the bottom again okay but it is rough on your hands okay so you can see that my hands took a little bit of a beating there so i'm gonna clean it up but you can see that um things kind of got dried out a little bit you can see it kind of chapped there right so i'm gonna go wash them first and then i'm gonna add lubriderm and there they make this in a this is a lotion uh but they also make it in a cream too so i think i've showed you the cream before so i'm going to use the lotion this time but let me go clean my wash my hands first all right so i just washed my hands but you can really see where it's still they're still kind of dry and they really feel dry too so it's good to add moisture back to your hands and i've done this before where i've washed my hands and then didn't moisturize them and then later on in the day you can really feel it later on in the night after we've done it after we've worked with that mortar so there you go okay so i hope that was helpful for you uh again just getting in those cracks like that it's just so much easier to use your to use your fingers and then just make sure you clean up afterwards you don't want to have mortar on your flagstone and let it dry so you got to keep an eye on that so you get it down inside there and then make sure you clean it off good so you saw me brushing it away because you don't want to have any kind of haze stuck on your flagstone but uh anyway it is hard on your hands so again thank you luberderm for sponsoring this video and i thank you for watching and god bless you