Concrete floor installation in La Verne CA - a slab planned for the floor that covers it

Most calls about a new floor come from a house that's getting a room added, a garage being turned into living space, or an old slab that has cracked or let moisture ruin the flooring above it. The price moves with the size of the room, whether an old floor has to be broken out and hauled away, how much digging and packing the ground underneath needs, and how easy it is to get concrete into the space. The schedule turns less on the pour itself than on the cure and the drying time before your flooring can go down. If the floor is for a garage that will stay a garage, our garage floor concrete page covers that work, and either way the written estimate I leave after my visit gives you the figure for your space.

An indoor floor starts with what will cover it, because tile, wood and carpet each ask something different of the slab, so that's the first thing I ask. Our crew then breaks out any old floor, digs out the subgrade, which is the ground the slab sits on, and packs it firm, since a base that's only raked level settles later and takes the floor with it. We lay the moisture layer your flooring calls for, set rebar, the steel bars that tie the slab together, and then pour and finish the concrete. We cut control joints, shallow grooves that give the concrete a place to crack neatly, along lines we've planned together with you, and then let the slab cure, the slow wait that lets it gain its strength. If a budget has to give somewhere, I'd rather it came out of anything but the base, because the base is buried on the first day and the only way to fix it later is to break out the floor.

A new floor often changes the ground just outside it, so we can pour the concrete steps down to the yard while we're there. If your house has a pool, the concrete pool deck around it is flatwork, the flat outdoor concrete like patios and walks, and it gets the same packed base we put under a floor.

The city's Building Department helps with building permit applications and records at 909-596-8706, but the permit list it publishes names solar work, not concrete floors, so it doesn't settle whether your floor needs a permit. We check with the city on each job, and where a permit is needed we handle the application and set up the inspections.

When you're comparing contractors, it helps to know the state's rule on payments. The Contractors State License Board says a contractor can't ask for or accept a down payment of more than $1,000, and less than that on a smaller contract, and any other payments have to be listed in the contract and match work already done or materials already delivered to your home. Summer afternoons here get hot, so we schedule the pour early in the day, before the top of the slab can dry out ahead of the crew finishing it. We see the same kind of work, rooms added onto older houses and garages turned into living space, on jobs in Claremont and San Dimas.