You are reading about a crew based south of you
If your address is up the valley and the concrete company you are looking at loads out down in Carroll County, the real question underneath is whether that drive quietly becomes your problem. It does not. The corridor is a routine run for us, not an expedition somebody has to be talked into, and we are up that way regularly rather than once a season.
The radius we work is roughly an hour to an hour and a half in any direction out of Woodlawn, and the New River Valley sits comfortably inside it. What the drive earns you is an earlier start on our end, not a shorter list of what we will do once we get there.
A valley pour gets planned backward from the delivery window
Concrete runs on its own clock. Once the trucks load, the pour is happening whether the site is ready or not, so the day gets built around the batch schedule instead of the other way around. We aim to be on site and set up before the first truck turns in, with forms checked and braced, the base dampened and the finishing tools laid out. On a job up the corridor that mostly means the alarm goes off earlier.
An address out on a state route, or well up a county road with nobody else on it, is ordinary here rather than a complication. So is a lot that falls away behind the house, which is common enough on this ground that access gets planned before anything else does.
The pump comes up the corridor too
The pump does not work a tighter circle than the crew does. It travels the same ground, so you do not get the finish work at your address and lose the pumping to distance. It is a trailer-mounted line pump running 2.5 inch and 3 inch hose, towed in and set up on the ground, with our operator at the machine and our hose hand at the placing end. There is no boom on it.
That matters on valley lots more than it sounds like it should. Basement floors and walkout pours, a backyard behind a fence with one gate, a slab downhill from the only firm ground a truck can sit on: those are hose jobs. The concrete lands in the forms rather than crossing your yard one wheelbarrow load at a time. A pump usually makes sense when the pour is a foundation, when it runs roughly eight cubic yards or more, or when the truck simply cannot get close enough.
Where the valley sits inside the range we work
Up the interstate corridor the regular stops are Pulaski, Radford, Christiansburg and Blacksburg, and that stretch fills a good share of any week. East of the shop, Floyd and the ridge country around it are steady ground, with the Roanoke Valley marking the outer edge on that side. West of us it is Wytheville, the countryside out through Wythe County, and on toward Marion when a job makes sense of the drive. Here is the sort of work that fills a valley week.
- Driveways, aprons and parking pads, new or replacing gravel
- Garage floors, shop slabs and outbuilding floors
- Footers, poured walls and foundations for new builds and additions
- Sidewalks, steps, porches and landings
- Patios, including stamped and decorative finishes
- Commercial flatwork, pads and tie ins at the street
- Tear out and haul off of concrete that is past saving