Greenwood Village Concrete Repair

Cracks get the phone call. The crack is almost never the thing that went wrong. On properties out here, with long drives, wide front walks, and irrigation running most of the summer, what gives out first is the few inches of dirt and rock holding the concrete up. Water finds a path, fines wash away, a hollow opens, and the slab does the only thing an unsupported slab can do.

So we start underneath. We sound panels with a hammer, probe the joints, look at where your downspouts land, and work out where the ground is going before anybody quotes a patch. Fill the crack and leave the void and you have bought two seasons. Maybe three. Fix the reason and the repair stops being a line item you pay every few years.

What is actually under a slab that cracked

Concrete is strong in compression and weak in tension. Almost everything that goes wrong with flatwork traces back to that one sentence. While the ground presses back evenly across the whole underside, the slab just sits there doing its job. Take away support beneath one corner and the concrete has to span the gap on its own. It can't. So it breaks, and it breaks at the weakest line it can find.

Under a walk or a drive here we expect compacted road base over native soil. What we often find is a thin skim of gravel, or nothing, with concrete cast straight onto graded dirt. Add twenty years of sprinkler cycles and spring runoff and those fines migrate somewhere else. Now the panel is bridging air. Tap it with a hammer and you'll hear it. A supported slab thuds. A hollow one rings, and that sound is most of the diagnosis in about four seconds.

Where the water under your concrete came from

When to put repair work on the calendar here

April through October is the easy answer, and September may be the single best month for it. Nights cool down, patch material stops flashing off in an hour, and the work gets a real cure behind it before the first shovel and the first bag of ice melt come out.

Winter isn't a flat no. Crack routing and joint work happen in the cold with materials rated for it. What we won't do is set a structural patch on frozen subgrade, because that ground drops when it thaws and takes the repair down with it. There's a diagnostic reason to wait, too. Soil tells the truth differently wet and dry, and a February walk with everything locked up solid reads better than the site actually is. Call in December anyway. We'll look, knock down anything that's a trip hazard, and put you near the top of the spring board.

What we correct below the patch

• A sounding pass over every panel, so we map where support stopped rather than where the crack shows
• Voids filled and compacted before one bit of new concrete goes over them
• Failed base pulled and replaced with road base placed in lifts, not dumped and raked
• Drilled dowels tying new work into sound concrete so the two pieces move together
• Joints re-cut where the original spacing was too wide to control anything
• The slab edge daylighted so water leaves instead of standing against it
• Downspout, emitter, and grade fixes written into the estimate so nothing gets done twice

Half the repairs we quote out here come with a sprinkler conversation. People are proud of the lawn and we get that. But if a head soaks the same two feet of subgrade every morning at five, that panel keeps dropping no matter how good the patch is.Our crew lead, after the walkthrough