Concrete Contractor in Greenwich, CT

What Does a Concrete Contractor Do on a Greenwich Property?

A concrete contractor handles anything that gets poured, formed and finished on site: the driveway and its apron, walkways, front steps, garage and shed slabs, pool decks, patios, and the footings and walls that hold back a graded slope. On a typical property here the work starts with excavation, because almost nothing in this town sits on clean sand. Under the topsoil is glacial till — a dense, stony mix left behind by the ice sheet — and often bedrock within a few feet of the surface.

That means the job is mostly about what happens before the truck arrives. Strip the organics, cut to grade, bring in and compact a crushed stone base, set forms dead level to a string line, tie in the reinforcing steel, and only then pour. Concrete does not fail because somebody mixed it wrong. It fails because the ground under it moved.

Why Does Concrete Fail Faster Here Than It Should?

Three things in this climate destroy slabs, and all three are local.

Freeze-thaw. Between November and March the ground here freezes and thaws over and over, sometimes in the same week. Water that soaked into the slab expands about nine percent when it turns to ice. Do that a few dozen times a winter and the surface starts flaking off in sheets. That is called scaling, and it is why every exterior pour needs air-entrained concrete, which builds microscopic air pockets into the mix to give the ice somewhere to go.

Deicing salt. Town trucks salt Putnam Avenue, King Street and the hill roads heavily, and cars carry that brine straight up your driveway. Chlorides pull moisture into the concrete and corrode the rebar underneath. Rusting steel swells to several times its original volume and cracks the slab from the inside out. Near the water in Old Greenwich and Riverside, salt air does a slower version of the same thing.

Roots and drainage. The mature oaks, maples and beeches that make these streets what they are also send roots under flatwork looking for water. Combine that with the clay pockets in our till, which hold water instead of draining it, and you get slabs that heave one winter and settle the next. Where a slope is already moving, the fix is usually a proper wall — we build poured walls that hold a grade back with the drainage behind them done right.

How Do You Pour Concrete That Survives a Connecticut Winter?

There is no trick to it. There is a standard, and most of the failures we get called out to look at skipped part of it. We dig footings to the 42-inch frost depth the Connecticut code requires, so nothing structural sits inside the zone that freezes. Flatwork gets a compacted processed stone base, typically six to eight inches on a driveway, so water drains out from under the slab instead of sitting there. Every exterior pour is air-entrained, usually a 4,000 psi mix for driveways and anything carrying vehicles.

Steel goes in on chairs so it sits in the middle of the slab where it does something, not thrown on the ground and pulled up by eye halfway through the pour. Control joints get cut within the first day, spaced at roughly two to three times the slab thickness in feet, because concrete is going to crack and the only real decision is whether it cracks where you chose. Then it cures slowly and gets sealed before the first winter.

What We Build

Most calls we take are one of two jobs: a driveway that has gone too far to patch and needs to come out, or a new patio off the back of the house. If the surface is tired but the slab underneath is sound, we will tell you so, and the answer is usually repair and resurfacing instead of a tear-out. When the finish matters as much as the surface, concrete can be pressed and colored to look like bluestone or cobble for a fraction of what real stone costs installed.

What Affects the Cost of Concrete Work?

Price on a concrete job comes down to a handful of honest variables, and anyone who quotes you over the phone without seeing the site is guessing.

• Square footage and thickness. A four-inch walkway and a six-inch driveway that trucks park on are different jobs at the same square footage.
• Demolition and disposal. Breaking out and hauling an existing slab is real labor, and dump fees are charged by weight.
• Ledge and rock. The single biggest surprise on properties north of the Merritt. Hitting bedrock where the plan called for excavation changes the number.
• Access. Long, narrow, tree-lined driveways in the backcountry mean the truck cannot reach the pour. Wheeling it in by buggy or pumping it adds time and equipment.
• Drainage work. If water is the reason the old slab failed, pipe and stone have to go in or the new one fails the same way.
• Finish. Broom finish is the baseline. Stamping, coloring, exposed aggregate and borders each add labor.

Should You Repair It or Replace It?

Look at what is failing. If the problem is on the surface — flaking, a few hairline cracks, discoloration, one settled section — the slab underneath is usually still doing its job and repair is the right call. Slabs can be lifted back to grade, cracks can be routed and filled structurally, and a worn surface can be overlaid.

Replace it when the base has failed. The signs are cracks wider than a quarter inch that run the length of the slab, sections that rock under your foot, pieces that have separated with different elevations on either side, or a surface that has spalled down to exposed stone. At that point you are paying to repair something that will keep moving. Tear it out, fix the base, and pour it once.

Where We Work in Town

We pour throughout Greenwich — the older colonials in Cos Cob and Chickahominy where original walkways and steps are eighty years old, the flat coastal lots in Old Greenwich and Riverside where drainage and salt air drive the work, Byram and Pemberwick, Glenville, Belle Haven, and the long sloped drives off Round Hill Road, Lake Avenue and North Street. Each of those presents a different problem. A backcountry driveway is an access and grading job. A shorefront patio is a drainage and corrosion job.

Common Questions