Concrete floor installation in Saratoga CA - a floor that's planned before the pour

Most people who call are turning a garage or a dirt-floored space into a room, building an addition, or replacing a floor that's cracked, sunken or dusty. If it's a garage, our garage floor concrete page covers that job. The price moves with the size of the floor, how much digging and base work the ground needs, whether the slab gets steel, and how easy it is to get concrete to the spot. The schedule mostly turns on the city, because any pipes or conduit have to be in and inspected before we can pour, and after that on the curing time. We check early on what the city wants for your job, and I'll give you your own figure when I come out for the estimate.

We start under the floor, digging out and packing the base, the ground the slab sits on, because a floor poured on loose dirt settles right along with it. Next we set the forms and the rebar, steel bars that tie the slab together, and any pipes or conduit in the slab go in and get looked at before we pour. We pour early in the day rather than in the midday heat, which can leave a weak, dusty top, then finish the surface and cut control joints, shallow grooves that give the slab a straight place to crack instead of a random one. Before we start, I'll tell you plainly that an indoor floor will show a few cracks, and I'll walk you through how the steel and the curing keep them narrow. The base is the part you'll never see again, and it's usually the first thing people want to trim when the budget gets tight. I'd rather save money somewhere else, because a nice finish on a poor base doesn't hold up.

A new floor often comes with other work around it. If the room opens onto the yard, we can pour concrete steps down to it while the crew is already set up, and if you're redoing the back of the house around a pool, our concrete pool decks start from the same careful base work.

In Saratoga, the city says a permit is required in most cases before construction, alteration, repair or demolition work starts, so plan on one for a new floor. When a permit applies, we handle the contractor's side of it and help you with the parts that fall to you as the owner. The city's slab inspection happens after every pipe, conduit and anything else in the slab is in place, and before any concrete goes down, so that inspection is what sets the pour date. If the floor is part of a new building, an addition or a basement on a hillside with landslide risk or close to a creek, the city also requires geotechnical clearance, a sign-off on the ground itself, so tell me about the lot early.

A lot of the floors we pour around here go into older houses, garage conversions and additions on sloped lots, where the concrete often has to come through a narrow side yard. We see the same tight access and hillside lots on jobs in Los Gatos and Cupertino, and we plan the pour around them the same way.