Concrete built for Brandon roots

Sand, fill and what holds a slab up

Brandon sits on sand. Under the sod there is a foot or so of gray sandy fill over whatever the builder graded when the groves and pasture came out, and sand does not hold a shape on its own. It moves when water runs through it, and it settles wherever it was dumped and never properly compacted. A slab poured straight onto that is only as flat as the day it cured. The concrete is rarely the problem on a failed driveway here. The ground under it is.

So the prep takes longer than the pour. We strip the topsoil and the roots out, then bring the base back up in lifts and compact each one. The grade gets checked across the whole area before a single form goes in. Steel goes where the load is, and the edge gets thickened where a truck or a trailer will sit. None of that shows once the concrete is down, which is exactly why it gets skipped on a cheap job. It is also the whole difference between a slab that stays flat and one that cracks along the wheel line.

You can usually read a bad base off the surface. A panel drops at one corner, or a crack keeps opening a little wider every wet season. Tap the edge with a hammer and listen: hollow means there is a void under there, not a surface problem, and no amount of patching over the top fixes it. Sometimes the fix is cutting out the section that failed and putting it back on a proper base. Sometimes the honest answer is that the whole apron has had it and you are better off tearing it out. We will tell you which one you are looking at.

• Topsoil and roots stripped before any base goes down
• Base rebuilt in lifts and compacted
• Grade shot so water runs away from the house
• Edges thickened where trucks and trailers park
• Old concrete demolished and hauled off the lot

Oak roots and the slabs they lift

Older Brandon streets came with live oaks, and those oaks are now bigger than the houses. The roots run shallow and wide in sandy ground, looking for the damp under a slab, and a driveway is a good place to find it. Give it enough seasons and a root the thickness of your arm is riding under the concrete and lifting one edge of a panel. That is the raised lip you catch a toe on at the sidewalk, and the crack that runs at an angle across the drive instead of down a joint.

Grinding the lip off buys you a season and does nothing about the root, which is still growing. Taking the root out can save the concrete and cost you the tree, so it depends on how big it is and how close to the trunk you are cutting. Usually the sensible move is lifting the failed panels, dealing with what is under them, and putting the concrete back with joints placed where the movement wants to go. Concrete cracks. Where it cracks is the part you get to control, and a joint in the right place turns a mess into a line.

It is the same story on a walkway, except there somebody trips. Along the older commercial frontage in Brandon you see public walks that have been heaved and patched for years, and warehouse yards where truck traffic keeps pounding the same soft spots back open every summer. That work is demolition and replacement, done in sections so the door stays usable and nobody is walking through wet concrete. We take commercial jobs as well as houses. Whatever caused the failure gets dealt with before anything is poured back, because otherwise you are buying the same repair twice.

Where the rain goes on a flat lot

Brandon is flat and inland, which sounds like the easy version until it rains. There is no slope to speak of and nowhere for water to go in a hurry, so the subdivisions were laid out around retention ponds and swales, and every lot is supposed to send its share that way. An afternoon storm in August can put down more water in an hour than the ground will take, and whatever your slab does with that water it does for the life of the slab.

A patio extension is where this bites people. Somebody pours a nice new pad off the back of the house, dead level because level looks right, and now there is a wide flat shelf holding water against a block wall every time it storms. Block wicks. You get damp at the base of the wall inside, and stains on the paint outside, and it took a slab to cause it. The pad wants fall away from the house, and where it meets the door it wants a step down so nothing runs back at the threshold.

So we shoot the grade before we form anything, and if the ground is fighting you we say so at the estimate rather than after the pour. Sometimes it means a drain line under the pad, sometimes it means cutting a swale so the water leaves the way the neighborhood was designed for it to leave. Enrique wrote this on our Google listing: "Jose responded all my questions and took the time to find a solution to resolve some terrain problems, then water can flow without any problems." That is the part of the job people do not see.

Getting a price in Brandon

Call (813) 812-1892 and you get Jose, or send the form and we will come out and look at it. The estimate is free and it comes to you in writing, with what we are taking out, what is going back, how thick it will be, and what it costs, so you can hold it next to anybody else's number and compare the same things. We work Monday through Saturday, and Brandon is a short run from the shop.