Residential Concrete Services

Residential concrete across the Denver metro

All the residential concrete services on this page sit under the same exposure classification. Exterior concrete on the Front Range is ACI 318 class F3, freeze-thaw cycling with deicing chemical contact, and that sets the same floor for a garden walkway as for a driveway that takes a work truck: 4,000 psi, air entrainment at 6.5 percent, and a water-cement ratio at or below 0.40.

What changes between the services below is the load, the drainage and the finish. A hot tub pad and a patio look similar and are not the same slab. A retaining wall is a structural problem rather than a flatwork one. Choosing correctly at the start is most of the job.

Residential concrete services

Three things that decide how long it lasts

The first is the base. Most driveway failures we are called to look at are not strength failures, they are base failures. The slab cracked because what was underneath it moved. Adding thickness on top of poor compaction produces bigger pieces, not fewer cracks.

The second is air entrainment. Microscopic bubbles are mixed into the concrete so freezing water has somewhere to expand rather than pushing the surface apart. A 5,000 psi slab without it will spall in a Colorado winter, and a properly air-entrained 4,000 psi slab will not. Ask for the batch ticket.

The third is jointing. Concrete shrinks as it cures, and shrinkage cracking is not a defect. The design question is whether it happens where someone planned for it. Panels kept close to square, joints cut to a quarter of the slab depth, spaced to suit the thickness.