Highlands Ranch Mudjacking

Subdivisions built in one push tend to fail in one push too. A whole street of Westridge front walks went in during the same few weeks, over trenches backfilled by the same crew, and thirty-some years later those walks are dropping in the same places. Same story on garage aprons, where the water and sewer laterals run out to the street under four inches of concrete.

Mudjacking puts those panels back where they belong. We drill a small grid of holes, pump a slurry of sand, cement, and water underneath, fill the void, and float the slab up until it reads level against its neighbor. The concrete you already own stays. The trip hazard leaves. And you park on it that afternoon.

The slabs that sink here, and the houses they came with

Age tells you a lot about which panel dropped. On the older side of the community, Northridge and Westridge, the usual suspects are the front walk and the strip of driveway right at the garage door. Both sit over trench backfill that was dumped in and tamped by boot rather than compacted in lifts. Water finds those trenches, the loose fill settles, and the slab loses its support from the middle out.

Eastridge and Southridge bring a different pattern. Those yards have had thirty years of sprinkler heads spraying the same six feet of patio edge, and the soil under that edge has been wet and dry so many times it packs down like a mattress with a person-shaped dent. Newer streets in BackCountry and The Hearth aren't immune either. When a builder backfills against a foundation and the landscape crew tops it off two months later, the settlement is still coming. We lift plenty of ten-year-old patios.

Which sunken slab is a lift candidate

Voids, water, and picking your season

A slab doesn't sink because the concrete got tired. It sinks because something below it left. Loose backfill compresses, a slow irrigation leak washes fines out sideways, a downspout drops a hundred gallons in one spot during an August cloudburst, and the panel bridges the gap until it can't. Our slurry goes into that gap. Sand-and-cement mud is heavy on purpose, which is exactly what you want when the void needs filling as much as the slab needs raising.

Season matters less for lifting than for pouring, and that's one of the nice things about it. April through November is easy. We work through cold snaps too, right up until the top few inches of ground go hard, because frozen soil won't let the mud spread the way it needs to. Late summer is our busiest stretch, since that's when storm runoff exposes every soft spot in a yard. If the drop is bad enough to catch a toe, don't wait for spring. A hazard doesn't care what month it is.

Included on every lift we do

• Elevation shot across the low panels and their neighbors so we lift to a real target
• Hole layout planned to the void, not stamped on a lazy uniform grid
• Slurry mixed on site and pumped in stages so the slab rises evenly
• Constant checks against a string line and level while the mud goes in
• Holes packed and finished flush with a color-matched patch
• Joints and edges cleaned, caulked where they should be, so water stops going back under
• A look at whatever caused it: downspouts, grade, sprinkler heads pointed the wrong way