I was instantly worried because my brother never has brilliant ideas and I knew that the concrete wouldn’t hold with this sort of setup.
My brother has always been the type of person to cut corners in the situations in life where it’s the least conducive. When he was trying to impress one of his employers in his early 20s, he tried to lie about how much work he was completing whenever management was away from the office. Little did he know but he had his computer monitored at all times, meaning they already knew exactly how much time he was spending actually working at his computer and not distracted on his phone. I told him repeatedly that there were no cheat codes to success or money in life, and that he should be really suspicious if anyone ever suggests otherwise. It’s not just with his path of employment or career that he cuts corners, he also does it at home with improvement projects. This past summer he decided that he wanted a huge concrete block front porch like the one our parents’ house had when we were growing up. He said that he came up with a “brilliant idea” to stack cinder blocks and then coat them with a thin layer of concrete on the outside surfaces. I was instantly worried because my brother never has brilliant ideas and I knew that the concrete wouldn’t hold with this sort of setup. You need steel rebar tie wire running through thick concrete structures like porches where the concrete is thicker than six inches. I told him to buy a coil of 14-gauge black annealed steel rebar and a pack of double loop wire ties. He refused and learned the lesson the hard way after his porch failed within a few months of summer rain showers.