Concrete Flower pots

I had three concrete flower pots added to my stamped concrete deck. These look pretty darn cool and are wired with electricity/lights, and irrigation (with drainage) for my wife's flowers. They also have an implanted thick-wall pipe that can be used to place my patio umbrellas into. They are, per the patio design, 30" square on the outside with 18" inset square on the inside that is 12" deep. While the final poured dimensions were "reasonably close enough" to that, I've had/have a few issues with 'em.

First, the patio lighting fixtures had been placed level (with lines marked above 'em) but during the pour process, they were bumped, so over half of 'em were no longer level. Thanx to Alan the (awesome) handyman, this was addressed by drilling new holes into the fixtures so the covers could be placed level. A bit of extra work and I may have to redrill some thread holes down the road; but best we could do given the situation.

Another issue was one of the PVC pipes was jostled loose during the pour, so it was not possible to run electrical wire between the second and third flower pot. This was a major bummer as we tried all sorts of stuff including drilling it out, but it probably side-slipped. Eventual solution to this one was running buried conduit from a wire I had run outside of the concrete patio on the West side to a near-ground level outlet on the East side. Bad news is that it was about 70' of conduit to bury (and the outlet now extends out) - good news is that it was in ground, not in concrete. This was a LOT of extra work, but again, this was the best we could do given the situation - tunnelling under the concrete flower pots would NOT be a good idea.

One last major issue that I'm hoping can be fixed better is a patch applied to the West flower pot. The pour itself had quite a bit of concavity - like someone had punched a hole in the concrete flower pot. The finishing guy said he could make it look real good. So while he was able to flatten the surface, the patch looks like ... welll ... a patch! :-(

In hindsight it might have been better to not even try to patch this, but I'm really hoping when they come back they can make it blend better; we'll see. If you are a concrete expert, please comment on the concrete blog with your ideas/suggestions.

Guess where the patch was applied?

Head-on view of the concrete flower pot