Concrete answers

What people are usually looking at when they land here

Almost nobody reads a concrete page for fun. You are out on the slab looking at a crack that was not there in the fall. Or you have a written page from a crew in front of you and one line on it does not make sense. Or somebody gave you a number over the phone and it is nowhere near what you found online. Those are the three ways a person ends up reading about concrete on a Tuesday night.

So the index below is grouped by the subject you are actually standing in, not by the order we felt like writing them. Find the group that matches the thing in front of you and your question is usually a line or two down it.

Every entry is one page and one question, and the title is the question. If the title is not what you asked, it is not your answer, and you have lost about four seconds finding that out.

The number comes first, before any explaining

Each page opens with a short block that answers the question outright. If you asked how long before you can drive on it, the first sentence has days in it. If you asked how thick a shop slab should be, the first sentence has inches in it. That block sits at the top on purpose, so somebody who only wants the number can take it and go back outside.

Under it is the part for people who kept reading: what moves the answer, what it looks like when it goes wrong, and what we would say if you called and described it out loud. Then a couple of follow up questions, because a real answer almost always raises a second one.

Where a page leans on a piece of trade vocabulary, that word carries its own definition page. If what you are stuck on is a word rather than a question, the glossary is the other half of this and it is built the same way.

The questions we left out on purpose

There are questions we get asked that are not on this list, and they are missing for one reason. We do not yet have an answer we are willing to put our name on. Permits are the clearest case. What a county wants for a flat pour is a call the local building official makes, and we would rather point you at a five minute phone conversation than publish a confident sentence that turns out to be wrong at your address. Our Virginia permit guide covers the part of that which is settled, and the rest is worth asking about out loud before anybody sets a form.

The same goes for anything that only reads off your own written estimate. Workmanship warranty terms are confirmed there in writing rather than promised on a web page, and payment terms are spelled out on the same sheet before you sign anything. We could fill those pages with something reasonable sounding. We would rather you get the real one on paper with your address at the top.

Why a concrete crew sat down and wrote all this out

There is no download here and no form between you and the answer. We do not want your email address. A good share of the people who read one of these pages will fix a small thing themselves, or find out their slab is fine and stop worrying, or hire somebody closer to home, and for those pages that is the right outcome.

The rest of it is simple enough. Concrete is a trade where the difference between a thin bid and a real one is buried under the slab where nobody can see it: the base, the thickness, the steel, and where the water goes. Somebody who knows what those four are worth asks better questions of every crew that comes out, ours included. We would rather compete in front of a person who knows what they are looking at.

We are a family run outfit in Woodlawn, just outside Hillsville. We pour flatwork and we run our own trailer mounted line pump, so when one of these answers turns out to be a job rather than a fix, that is who shows up to measure it.