Concrete contractor in East Los Angeles - slabs built for tight lots

A lot of the houses here are older and sit on tight lots, and their concrete got added a piece at a time over the years, a driveway, a patch, then a slab over half the backyard. Most of it went down on raked dirt instead of a base that was dug out and packed, so it settles, cracks at odd angles and often tips water back toward the house. Before we pour anything, we check where your water runs and set the new slab to carry it away from your walls instead of into them or into the neighbor's yard.

East LA also has its own community plan and a community standards district, kept by LA County Planning. Before we change what's in your front yard, we check whether either one touches the job.

East Los Angeles has no city hall of its own, so building permits here come from LA County Public Works through its East Los Angeles Building and Safety Office. When you apply, the office says whether the job needs a plan check, a review of the drawings before anything is approved, and that review has to clear before we can set a pour date. Look up any contractor's license with the Contractors State License Board before you sign. The County's own business license is for certain businesses located in the unincorporated area, so for a contractor based outside it, like us in El Monte, the state license is the one to check. We're fully licensed and insured, we pull the permit and line up the inspections, and if the County wants a soils report or an engineer's plans first, I tell you at the start and help you get them. The price moves with the size of the slab, how much old concrete comes out, how much base work the ground needs, the steel and finish, and how hard it is to get the truck to your yard. The schedule turns on the permit and on curing, the days new concrete needs to gain strength before it can take weight.

Residential streets here are lined with parked cars, so we plan where the mixer truck will stand and give the neighbors notice before pour day. Small property owners along Whittier Boulevard call us for walkways and parking areas, and those jobs get scheduled around when the business is open. We do the same work in Monterey Park next door and down in Norwalk, where the permit goes through the city instead of the County, so we sort out which office it is before we quote.

East Los Angeles is mostly blocks of single-family houses, many of them older, on narrow lots, with Whittier Boulevard along the south end as the busiest street for shops and vendors. Most of our calls here come from homeowners with a cracked driveway or a backyard paved in pieces, and some come from small property owners near the boulevard who need a walkway or a lot redone.

It's a short drive from our base in El Monte. Tight lots mean less room for the truck and more old concrete broken out by hand, and older yards usually hide something under the old slab that we only see once it's open, so I price the base work honestly from the start.