Garage floor concrete in El Monte CA - a hard, even floor built on solid ground

If your garage floor is cracked through, sinking at the door or wearing to dust, patching it usually just buys time, because the problem is in the ground under it. The price moves with the size of the garage, how much old concrete has to come out, how much soft dirt we have to dig out and replace, and whether you plan to coat the floor. The schedule turns mostly on the city, because if your job needs a permit or a soils report, that comes before we pour. When the old slab needs clean saw cuts at the doorway or along the walls, we handle that with our concrete cutting work. I put all of it in a written estimate that says what's in the price and what isn't.

We start by breaking out the old slab and hauling it away, then dig out the soft dirt, because the subgrade, the ground the floor sits on, is where most garage floors fail. We pack the base in layers instead of raking it level, check where water will run so the floor falls toward the door and not the house, and set rebar, steel bars that hold the slab together, before the truck shows up. We pour early to stay out of the midday heat, finish the top when the concrete is ready instead of when it's convenient, cut control joints, shallow lines that give cracks a place to go, and keep the slab damp while it cures, the slow hardening that makes the surface tough. When a budget gets tight, the base is the first thing people want to cut, because nobody sees it on day one. I won't cut it. A nice finish on bad ground cracks and sinks just the same, and you can't fix the ground later without tearing the floor out.

A garage floor often connects to other work. If you want the apron or the patio beside the garage to look like more than plain gray, our decorative concrete work adds color or texture over the same kind of base. If the garage is cut into a slope and dirt keeps pushing toward the slab, we build concrete retaining walls to hold it back before we pour.

Most of El Monte sits on loose ground. The city says the state has mapped most of El Monte inside liquefaction hazard zones, areas where shaking can turn wet soil soft, and that questionable soils show up all over the city because of the river-laid dirt and groundwater under the basin. For a garage floor, that means we never assume the dirt under the old slab is good, so we dig until we reach firm ground and pack the base from there. The city also requires a soil report from a California-registered geotechnical engineer before it permits new foundations or footings, or repairs that affect the existing foundation, no matter the size of the job. Whether that reaches your garage floor is a question for the El Monte Building Department, which handles plan review, permits and inspections, and whose counter staff tell you which other city departments get involved. The city expects a licensed contractor to secure the permits and allows owner-builder permits only on residential work. When a job needs a permit, we pull it and line up the inspections, and if the city wants a soils report or an engineer's plans first, I tell you at the start and help you get them.

We're based in El Monte and work in the cities around it, from Rosemead and Monterey Park out to West Covina and Pomona. A lot of the garages we see here are older, with floors poured on raked dirt that has settled since, and we find the same soft ground on jobs in Rosemead and South El Monte.