Concrete that holds under the oaks

Oak roots and the slabs they lift

Drive the streets around the university and you can read the age of the neighborhood in the trees. Big laurel oaks and live oaks were put in when these blocks were laid out, and they have had decades to spread. An oak root does not stop at the edge of a driveway. It runs under the slab looking for water, thickens a little every year, and eventually the concrete has to go somewhere. That somewhere is up.

You see it first as a hairline in the middle of a panel, then a lip at the joint where one section sits proud of the next. On a sidewalk that lip is what catches a shoe. On a driveway it holds water on the high side, and water standing on a crack does the rest. It gets down into the sand under the slab, washes it out, and leaves the panel sitting on nothing. Patching the top of that is money thrown away.

So the fix is not a skim coat over the lump. We cut out the panels the root has taken, get the root back and out of the way, put the sub-base back to grade and compact it, then form and pour so the new work drains toward the street instead of the house. Where a tree is staying, and most of them should stay, the new slab gets an edge and a joint pattern that lets it move without tearing itself apart.

• Lifted panels cut out, not patched over
• Roots cleared back before anything gets formed
• Sub-base put back to grade and compacted
• Trip edges taken out at the joint
• Old concrete hauled off, the drive swept

What the block ranch houses need

Most of the housing here is single-story block, stucco over the outside, sitting on a slab poured right on the sand. No basement, no crawl space. What that means for concrete is that everything you use outside is flat work: the driveway, the walk to the front door, the carport pad, the patio out back, the apron where the drive meets the street. All of it is doing structural duty and taking weather at the same time.

A lot of these places have been rentals for a long time, and a driveway that has had cars on it for that long tells you. Old flat work around here was often poured thin, straight onto loose sand, with no steel in it and joints in the wrong places. It holds up fine until something changes: a heavier vehicle, a bad summer of rain, a root, a leaking hose bib at the corner of the house. Then it cracks across the middle and the two halves start moving separately.

When we take one of these out we look at what is under it before we pour anything back. Sand gets graded and compacted, the depth gets set for what is actually going to park on it, and steel goes in where the slab needs it. If you are adding on, a carport enclosure or a room off the back, that is footings first and then the slab, tied together properly. We also do pavers and block work when that suits the house better than a poured surface.

Where the water goes on a flat lot

There is almost no fall to the ground around here. A lot that looks level to the eye usually is level, and that is the problem in a place where a summer storm empties on the block in minutes. Water does not run off a flat lot, it spreads and sits. Sand drains fast until it is saturated, and once it is saturated the water has to go sideways, which normally means toward the lowest thing on the property. Often that is a slab, and behind the slab, a wall.

So the slope is the job, not a detail at the end. A pad has to be set below the door threshold with a step down, and it has to fall away from the house at a rate you can actually see with a level, not a token amount that disappears the first time the ground settles. Where the yard already ponds, that has to be sorted before the concrete goes in, because a new slab in the wrong place makes a dam out of a puddle.

That part of the work is what customers tend to write about afterward. Enrique put it this way on Google: "I highly recommend this company. Very professional in general. 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." Terrain problems is the right phrase for it. On a flat sandy lot the concrete is the easy half, and where the water ends up is the half that decides whether you are happy later.

Getting a price in University

Call (813) 812-1892 and tell us what you are looking at, or send the form and we will take it from there. Estimates are free and you get the price in writing, broken down, so you can see what is coming out and what is going back in. Jose comes out and walks the job with you first, because a driveway somebody has stood on beats a driveway described over the phone. The shop runs Monday through Saturday, and it is a straight run up from Tampa.