Concrete patio construction in Saratoga CA - a patio that stays flat and sheds water

Most people call me about one of three things. The lawn out back turns to mud and they want somewhere to put a table, an old patio has cracked and sunk at one corner, or water sits on the slab after it rains. The price mostly moves with the size of the patio, how much digging and hauling it takes, whether old concrete has to come out first with concrete cutting, and how easy it is to get a wheelbarrow to the back. The schedule turns on what the city wants before we start, the weather on pour day and the short wait off the slab once it's down, and you'll get your own figure from the estimate after I've seen the yard.

I start by marking out the patio with you, so we agree on its size and where it meets the house before anyone digs. Then our crew digs out the grass, roots and topsoil, because that soft layer squeezes down unevenly under a slab and pulls it out of level. We pack the subgrade, the soil the patio sits on, then spread gravel and pack it in layers, and we set the forms with a gentle fall away from your house so rain runs off instead of toward the foundation. We schedule the pour away from the midday heat when we can, since a top that dries too fast turns weak and dusty later, and we cut control joints, shallow grooves that give the slab a planned place to crack, while the concrete is still fresh. If the budget gets tight, I'd rather trim the size than the base, because the base is the part you can't see on day one and can't fix later without tearing the patio out.

A patio usually connects to other work. If you'd like a patterned surface instead of plain concrete, our stamped concrete services start from the same dug-out, packed base. If there's no good way to reach the new patio, we can plan a concrete sidewalk from the side gate or driveway at the same time, so the two slabs meet cleanly at the same height.

The City of Saratoga says a permit is required in most cases before construction, alteration, repair or demolition work starts. For a planning permit, the Planning Division is the office to ask, and its own list names driveways and new pavers but not concrete patios, so it isn't settled ahead of time whether your patio needs one. I check early what the city wants for your job, and 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.

Saratoga yards tend to come with mature trees, sloped ground and older patios that were laid on raked dirt, and we see the same on jobs in Los Gatos and Cupertino. On a sloped lot we spend more time getting the fall of the slab right, since water coming off the hill has to go somewhere other than your back door. If your project creates or replaces 2,500 to 10,000 square feet of hard surface that water can't soak through, the city's small-project stormwater worksheet applies, which usually only comes up when a patio is part of a bigger yard job. We're based in Saratoga and work across Saratoga and the cities around it.