Concrete Steps
Question from Heidi:
I’m finally getting to making the steps from bags of concrete, & have a few questions. It looks pretty straight forward, but I’ve made the steps farther apart. I’ve attached pictures of the prep so far. You mentioned the need to have the bags touching each other, which is not the case here. Each bag is fully supported by the soil, no hanging edges that could be cracked off. Do you think I need to lower the step height to match the thickness of the bags?
The other question is about adding the water. The fellow at Home Depot, where I bought the cement, said they now line the bags with plastic to assure a longer shelf life, I guess. In wetting the bags, I plan to cut them open, pour water inside & stir it up. I would also drench them & surrounding area. I live in Spring Valley, & they are in full sun, so I know I’ll have to water them regularly for several (?) days. Does this sound like the thing to do? Any feedback would be quite welcome.
Answer from Pat:
It’s a REALLY bad idea to make the steps farther apart as your photo shows. This is the WRONG way to do the job. You have not built steps. You have made stepping stones. Stepping stones are not safe on hillsides, especially not heavy ones like bags of concrete.
To make steps you need many more bags. You probably need two more bags of concrete for each bag shown in your photo to make a proper flight of steps in the section your photo shows. You need to purchase at least nine and more likely ten more bags of concrete to complete the job correctly.
Follow the design in my photos. Don’t vary the system. Earth alone cannot hold these bags up. Each bag must be held up by the one below.
As I have repeatedly stated, but will try to explain once again, the only way that concrete bags can be safely used to make a flight of steps is when a portion of each concrete bag rests on the one below and you build them up from the bottom. First, use a hoe to make a flight of steps out of the earth and then roll the bags up onto each space making sure each bag is level like a step on top (not sloping) and that each bag must completely rest on the ground but some portion of each bag MUST (!!!!) rest on the one below. Also you MUST build your flight of steps from the bottom up. You can’t just plunk the bags on the ground, as you have done, in a row with space between them as you have it. These are not steps.
Go look at a nice flight of steps. Each step is connected to the one below, not floating separately with earth between them. This is because of erosion. Soil erodes, especially when it rains, but even in dry weather soil erodes.
The stepping stones you are making out of concrete bags are heavy. They will collapse and slide down the hill when you begin using them and they could be quite dangerous. You or a guest or child could twist an ankle or break a leg when the concrete stepping stones begin to move around and slide downhill. So I warn you seriously do NOT do this because you could be endangering yourself or others.
If you cannot understand how to do this, I suggest you either get someone to help you or abandon this project, and take the bags back to the store. Then purchase a paperback book on landscape design and use some more traditional system to make a winding path with terracing on the side or else hire a contractor to build a flight of steps up the hill.
My system would work fine if you had followed my instructions and photos, but please believe me, it will NEVER work this way.
Thanks for your feedback, Pat. I will alter my design accordingly. I hope the plan for the cement bag watering in is correct.
Through the years I have made 4 flights of these steps in my garden. The earliest flight of steps I made this way was based on the description I had seen in Sunset magazine in the 1950’s. I built them in 1957, 56 years ago. They are still exactly where I put them then and we have continued to use them ever since.
My father-in-law, John Lloyd Wright, (son of Frank Lloyd Wright and also an architect), who with his wife, Frances, my mother-in-law, lived next door to me for 28 years, laughed at my system. Nonetheless, he made another flight of steps to join up with them and continue up the hill towards his house. He used plaster mix instead of concrete and had his apprentice mix the stuff and trowel it. John’s steps look more architectural but in my opinion are not as pretty or as artistic as mine are, but they are still there. I made the last group of steps about twelve years ago and by then the concrete inside the bags was covered in plastic. Nonetheless, if you leave one of these bags lying around outside on the ground long enough it will eventually harden. We had an extra bag once and I told the man helping me to put it on the other side of a low fence so I could more easily step over the fence. He left the paper and the plastic on. After a month or two the concrete was hard as a rock and someone had torn off the paper, probably my gardener. It’s difficult, however, to have patience enough to wait long enough for them to harden this way unless in wet weather. If installed in wet weather this system would work wonderfully well, despite the plastic. Nonetheless, when I put in one flight of steps made with the plastic-lined bags, and they were in full, hot sun and a Santa Ana wind came along just then, I worried that sprinkling them was not going to be enough to harden the concrete inside the bags. However, I did not mix them, which I feared would make the heavy bags collapse. Instead, I made about 4 holes in the top of the bags about the size of a quarter and very gently poured some water inside the bags, not mixing. I also set up a sprinkler and turned it on for 10 or 20 minutes the steps three times a day to soak the area, including evening when the sun was going down, so the ground was wet overnight. I didn’t walk on them for three days and tore off the paper in about a week. The steps turned out fine. Don’t forget my system is for Redy-Crete, (bagged concrete, in other words) NOT cement (which is one ingredient of concrete and will shatter.) Many people miss-use the word “cement”. People talk about “cement walks” or “cement patios” etc. This is a mis-nomer. It would be impossible to build a walk-way or patio of cement. They are built of concrete. Also, while making these steps, I have always turned the bags over and over a few times to mix the ingredients inside the bag. The result has been a natural look, similar to stone. The steps i have built this way are artistic looking, as if they were made in ancient times and have survived for centuries. Part of that is due to the random look of the concrete. All my steps built this way worked fine and lasted many years except one flight of them when a contractor working for me would not listen to me or take directions. He is a good man but overly strong willed and does not think straight. I was gone and when I came home I found he had left spaces of earth between the bags, like you did, but worse since they were on a steep slope. The steps collapsed.