Aurora Mudjacking

A settled walkway is a symptom whose cause is buried four inches down. Concrete doesn't sag into a dip on its own. It follows the dirt, and the dirt went somewhere. So before anybody talks about lifting a panel, we want to know what's under it: how much base there is, whether there was ever any, and where the water that moved it comes from.

Mudjacking answers the void with a wet mix of sand, portland cement, and water, pumped through drilled ports until pressure carries the panel back up to its neighbor. Old method, still a good one. But it fits only when the ground can carry what we're adding, and that call gets made standing on your driveway.

Four things we find under a slab that dropped

The first is nothing. No gravel, no road base, just concrete laid on whatever the grader left behind. Plenty of older flatwork around Sterling Hills and Murphy Creek went in that way, and it holds up until the first stretch of wet years.

The second is base that used to be there. Roof water hitting one spot season after season carries the fines out from under the edge, and once they go the gravel loses its lock. You end up with a slab bridging a gap it never signed up for.

Third is a trench. Water, sewer, gas, and low-voltage lines all get dug in and backfilled, and backfill compacted with a shovel instead of a compactor keeps settling for a decade. Panels that dip along a straight line across the drive are almost always sitting on one of those.

Fourth is fill. Graded lots in Southshore, Saddle Rock, and Tallyn's Reach can have several feet of engineered fill on one side of a house and undisturbed ground on the other. When a slab spans that seam, one half stays and the other travels.

Water runs the whole operation, and the calendar follows it

Every void we fill was excavated by moving water. A downspout with no extension. A sprinkler zone throwing half its pattern onto concrete and soaking the edge every other morning. Or the yard itself, graded so the storms that build over the plains here drain toward the slab. Lifting without dealing with that is renting a level walkway.

Season matters for a reason that has nothing to do with comfort. Slurry is cement based, so it wants above-freezing ground to set properly, and frozen subgrade holds a slab artificially high while we work. Lift to that false grade in January and you inherit the old dip in April. March through November is our honest range. Late spring is busiest because winter's damage shows itself all at once, and fall is quietly the better booking: soil moisture has evened out, and a September lift gets months to settle in before anything freezes. One caution tied to summer here: a hard cloudburst saturates a subgrade in half an hour, and we give it a couple of dry days rather than pump into mud.

What we find below the panel, and what it means for a lift

The drill tells us more than the estimate did. You feel it drop through four inches of concrete and then keep going through nothing for another six, and right there you know the story. Sometimes it hits packed gravel an inch down and we stop and rethink the whole job.The crew lead's read on it

What we check before the drill comes out

• Probe through a joint or crack to confirm there's a cavity at all
• Measure the drop against a string line, not against a fence
• Look for hairlines that will open once lift pressure arrives
• Locate irrigation, low-voltage wire, and conduit below the panel
• Watch where surface water travels during a hard rain
• Choose slurry or polyurethane based on what the soil can hold
• Mark port locations with you before anything gets drilled