Englewood Concrete Patios

Nobody hires a concrete crew for the dirt. They hire us for the finished thing: the table, the grill, the string lights over the back corner. Fair enough. But by the time you're standing on a patio, every choice that decides whether it stays flat is already buried, and you will never look at any of it again.

Back yards here have history. Cherry Hills Vista and Broadway Estates sit on ground that's been landscaped, re-landscaped, trenched for sprinklers, and filled around additions. In Northwest Englewood we regularly open up a former shed footprint, a filled path, or a soft ribbon where a sewer lateral got replaced one summer. So we dig first and form second. A slab is only ever as flat as the ground holding it.

A patio is mostly the part you paid to have hidden

Four inches of concrete is stiff, but it's not a bridge. It carries load by spreading it into whatever is directly underneath, so support has to be even across the whole footprint. Even is the word that matters. A slab on ground that's firm in one half and spongy in the other doesn't sag gently. It snaps along the line between the two.

That's why day one of a patio job looks like nothing is happening. Strip sod, cut to grade, run a loaded machine across the subgrade and watch for spots that pump or rut. Those get dug out. Then rock goes in thin layers, packed as we go, because a plate only reaches so deep and a foot of loose rock dumped in one go stays loose forever.

What the excavator turns up in an older back yard

You just put a lid on part of the yard

Here's the thing about adding a patio: that ground used to absorb rain and now it doesn't. Every drop that lands on the slab has to go somewhere, and the wrong somewhere is toward the house. Pitched even slightly wrong, it hands every summer downpour straight to your foundation wall. That's a far bigger bill than the patio was.

So we shoot grade before forms go up and carry fall away from the house the whole distance. Where the yard runs the wrong direction we cut a swale past the slab edge, drop a drain, or step the patio down. We also isolate the slab from the house with a joint so the two aren't locked together, because they will not move the same amount and something has to give.

Season matters less on patios than people assume, but it isn't nothing. A spring dig waits until the yard is dry enough to pack. July work goes in at first light and keeps tarps handy for the storm that builds by three. September and October are the easiest weeks of the whole year. Cold-weather patios happen too, on heated water with blankets down, though frozen subgrade stops us every time.

What happens below grade before any concrete shows up

• Locates called, sprinkler heads and low-voltage lines flagged
• Sod and topsoil stripped off site rather than mixed into the base
• Subgrade proofrolled so soft pockets announce themselves under weight
• Anything that pumps or ruts dug out and replaced with structural fill
• Base rock spread in thin layers and packed, layer by layer
• Fall shot with a laser instead of eyeballed off the back door
• Steel tied and chaired at mid-depth, never laid on the ground and hooked up later
• Forms set to finished height, with a separation joint at the house wall