Garage floor concrete in Hayward CA - a slab that sits on packed, solid ground

Most people call us when the floor has sunk, cracked or started holding water, or when a new garage needs its first slab. The price turns on the size of the garage, whether an old floor has to be broken out and hauled away, how much soft ground has to come out, and how thick the slab and steel need to be. The schedule turns on whether the job needs a permit, the dig and base work, the weather on pour day and the wait before you can use the floor. The estimate I write up after seeing your garage gives you the number for yours, and if the driveway outside has sunk too, I can look at it on the same visit.

Before we pour, I tell you how we'll handle the parts you won't see afterward, because that's where a garage floor lasts or fails. If there's an old floor, we break it out and haul it off. Then we dig out the topsoil and any soft spots down to firm ground, pack the subgrade, the dirt the slab sits on, and shape it so water runs out the door instead of toward the back wall. We set rebar, steel bars that hold the slab together once it cracks, up off the dirt so it sits inside the concrete where it can do its job. We pour early in the day so the top doesn't dry out in the heat and go dusty later, trowel the inside smooth, give the apron a broom finish, a light scratched texture so tires and shoes grip in the rain, and cut control joints, shallow grooves that tell the slab where to crack. If the budget's tight, I'd rather trim the finish than the base, because a plain floor on packed ground outlasts a pretty one that settles.

A garage floor usually connects to other work. If you want the apron or the walk to the front door to pick up the look of the house with color or a pattern, that's our decorative concrete work. On sloped lots where the driveway cuts into a hill, concrete retaining walls keep the bank from pushing toward the garage.

Hayward requires building permits for almost all construction work, structural work and even demolition included, apart from the exceptions on its own list, so the permit question comes first on a garage floor here. Whether your job falls under one of those exceptions is the city's call, and its current list is the one that counts, so we work with the city on it for your address before we plan the pour. The city's online permit center lets you apply, add us as your contractor, pay fees, book inspections and see the results from home, and when the job needs a permit, we handle the paperwork and inspections with you.

A lot of the garages we pour here sit under older homes, so the job usually starts with breaking out the old floor. Hayward lists concrete among the materials to be fully recycled, so the slab we break out gets hauled off to be recycled, not dumped. We do the same tear-out and base work on garage floors in San Leandro and Castro Valley.