Garage floor concrete in La Verne CA - a slab built for the garage you plan to have

Most people call us when the old floor has cracked across, dropped near the door or soaked up so much oil that nothing will stick to it. Others are building a new garage and want the floor right from the start. The price moves with the size of the garage, whether the old slab has to be broken out and hauled away with our concrete cutting work, how much digging and packing the base needs, and what goes under and into the slab for a coating, a lift or a room. The schedule turns mostly on the curing wait and on the city's permit steps, and your written estimate gives you the figure for your own garage.

Before anything else, I ask what's next for the garage, such as a coating, a car lift or a finished room, because each of those changes what we put under the slab and how we build it. Then our crew breaks out the old floor if there is one, digs down to firm ground and packs the subgrade, the layer the slab sits on, because a floor poured over dirt that was only raked level will settle right along with it. We check where the water will run so it heads out the door and not toward the house, set the rebar, the steel that holds the slab together if it does crack, and lay a moisture barrier, a sheet under the slab that slows dampness coming up from the ground, when your plans call for one. We pour early in the day so the heat doesn't leave a weak, dusty top, cut control joints, shallow grooves that give the slab a chosen place to crack, before it can crack on its own, and then let it cure, the slow hardening before use, because how a slab cures has a great deal to do with how hard its surface ends up. If the budget is tight, I would rather you trim the finish than the base, since a finish can be improved later and the base can't be reached once the slab is down.

Some garage jobs touch other work. If plain gray won't do, our decorative concrete work can give the floor color or a finished look, and where the garage or driveway is cut into a slope, we build concrete retaining walls to keep the ground from pressing against the new slab.

In La Verne, permits and inspections come from the city's Building and Safety office, which checks building plans, issues permits for construction work and inspects for code compliance. Whether your garage floor needs a permit depends on the job, and that is the city's decision rather than mine, so we check with the city on every job and, where a permit is needed, we handle the application and set up the inspections. If you'd like to ask the city yourself, La Verne's Building and Safety office can be reached at 909-596-8706.

We're based in La Verne and work across the cities around it, and many of the garages we see are original floors that have cracked and settled over the years, or garages being turned into gyms, workshops and extra rooms. We get the same calls on jobs in Claremont and San Dimas, and we start every one of them the same way, by asking what the garage is going to become.