Garage floor concrete in Fargo ND - a floor poured on thawed, packed ground

Most garage floors we're called about have cracked across the middle, dropped near the door or started holding water where the car drips. Patching rarely lasts when the ground underneath has moved, so the usual fix is a new slab. The price turns on the size of the garage, whether the old floor has to be broken out and hauled off, and how much soft ground has to come out and be replaced. The schedule turns on thawed ground, a good pour day and the curing wait after it. If the apron and concrete driveway outside are in the same shape, it often makes sense to plan them together. I'll give you your own figure and the order of work in writing after I walk the garage.

I come out first, measure the garage and look at the old slab and where the water runs. Then our crew breaks out and hauls off the old floor, digs out soft or wet soil down to firm subgrade, which is the ground the slab rests on, and packs the base so the new floor doesn't sink with the dirt. We set the grade so water runs out the door and away from the house wall, and we lay rebar, steel bars that hold the slab together if it does crack. We only pour once the ground under the garage has thawed, because a slab placed on frozen soil settles later, and we start early in the day so summer heat doesn't leave a weak, dusty top. After the finish, we get the control joints cut on time, shallow sawn lines that give the slab a planned place to crack, so the cracks land where we want them instead of across the middle. If the budget's tight, I'd cut back on the finish before I'd cut back on the base, because nobody sees the base on day one and nobody can fix it once the concrete is on top.

Some jobs reach past the slab. If you'd like more than plain gray, decorative concrete adds color or pattern to a garage or shop floor. Where the yard drops away beside the garage or driveway, concrete retaining walls hold that soil back so the grade and drainage around the new floor stay where we set them.

Before we set a date, we check with the city on what your job needs. The Fargo Inspections Department enforces the city's building codes and asks anyone planning a project to contact it to go over the requirements, so you can call it yourself too. The city also lists cold weather concrete requirements among its code requirements, which we look at before any pour late in the year.

The ground here is the bigger factor. One Fargo-area builder describes the Red River Valley as freezing weather, frost-prone soil and plenty of water, with a fine-grained silty clay loam under much of Fargo and a water table that's often shallow. That's why our pour dates follow the thaw, and why we dig out the wet, soft spots instead of raking them level. We're based in Fargo and work across Fargo, West Fargo, Moorhead and the cities around them, and we meet the same heavy, wet ground on garage jobs in all of them.