Concrete floor installation in San Gabriel CA - a solid slab ready for your flooring

Usually you're replacing a slab that's cracked, sunk or gone uneven, or you're adding a space that needs a floor. If that floor is part of a new room tied into the house, it's really slab foundation building, and I'll tell you which one you're looking at. The price moves with the square footage, how thick the slab needs to be, whether an old one has to be broken out and hauled off, whether it gets steel inside and how easily we can get concrete to the spot. The schedule turns mostly on curing, the wait while the concrete hardens and gains strength before it takes weight, plus the city's review if your job needs a permit. Your own number comes from the estimate, once I've seen the space.

Before anything else I'll ask what's going on top, because if you plan to lay flooring or a coating, that changes how we protect the slab from moisture coming up from below, and it has to be settled before the pour. Then our crew breaks out any old slab, digs down to the subgrade, the ground the slab sits on, and packs a base so the floor doesn't settle later. We set the forms, place rebar, the steel bars that tie the slab together, if your job calls for it, and pour early in the day so the top doesn't dry too fast and turn weak and dusty. We finish the surface to suit what goes on it and cut control joints, shallow grooves that give the slab a place to crack where we chose instead of wherever it likes. The base is the part you never see, and it's the first thing people want to cut from the budget. I won't cut it, because a good finish over a poor base still cracks and sinks, and then you're paying twice.

The same crew builds concrete steps when a new floor sits higher than the yard and you need a safe way in. We also pour concrete pool decks on the same kind of packed base, with a broom finish, a lightly brushed texture, so wet feet don't slip.

The city decides whether your floor needs a permit, and in San Gabriel that usually means Planning Division approval first, then an application at City Hall for the kind of project you're doing. If you want to check before we talk, the city's permits page is the place to start. San Gabriel has also added its own structural changes to the building code because of nearby faults, so I don't guess at what the city will want. Before work starts, we settle with you who's handling any permit the city asks for and what it needs from us.

Construction here is allowed 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, with nothing on Sundays or the holidays the city sets, so we plan pour day around those hours and start early to beat the afternoon heat. A large metal bin for the old concrete needs no permit if it sits fully on your property, but one on the street does, so we keep it off the street when we can and leave the site swept so the neighbors aren't bothered. We're based in San Gabriel and work in the cities around it across the San Gabriel Valley, and we see the same older floors, poured thin or over a raked base, on jobs in Alhambra and Temple City.