Garage floor concrete in Williston ND - a slab that holds up to winter salt

Most calls start with an old floor that's flaking, cracked or tilted toward the back wall, or with a new garage that needs a floor before the walls go up. The price moves with the size of the garage, whether the old slab has to come out first, how much base work it needs and whether you plan to coat it later. The schedule moves mostly with the weather, because curing, the days the slab sits and gains strength before you use it, goes badly in hard cold. The estimate gives you the figure for your garage.

If there's an old floor, we break it out and haul it away. Then we dig out and pack the subgrade, the ground the slab sits on, because a base that's only raked level settles with the dirt and takes your floor with it. We set the forms so water runs out the door and not toward the house, and we tie in rebar, the steel inside that holds the slab together if it does crack. If you plan to coat the floor later, say so before we pour, because it changes what goes under the slab. We pour early in the day instead of in the midday heat, finish the top smooth or with a light broom finish for grip, and cut control joints, grooves that give the concrete a place to crack where you won't care, on a layout we go over with you first. The base is the part nobody sees on day one, which is why it's the first thing people want to cut from the budget. I'd rather you save money on the finish, because a nice top over a bad base cracks anyway.

Some jobs reach past the floor. If you want the apron or the area around the garage to have color or a pattern, that's our decorative concrete work. When the garage sits into a slope and the ground beside the pad needs holding back, we build concrete retaining walls so the grade around the new floor stays put.

Who reviews what depends on where you live and what you're building. Inside the city of Williston, the Engineering office in Public Works handles permits for sidewalks, aprons and approaches, and its list doesn't name garage floors, so that list doesn't settle whether a new floor in an existing garage needs a permit. A new detached garage is different, because the city counts it as an accessory structure, and its building permit application needs a site plan showing the existing buildings and the distances from your property lines, which you're responsible for locating. Outside the city, Williams County requires a building permit before anyone builds, alters or repairs a structure or does grading or drainage work. North Dakota leaves code enforcement to the cities, counties and townships, so the rules can change from one address to the next. Before we start, we work out with you whether the city or the county covers yours, and we take care of the permit paperwork when the job calls for one.

On garage jobs around Williston, the wear we see starts where the car parks, because salt brine drips off the wheel wells and sits there through every freeze and thaw. One trade guide advises hosing that salt off when conditions permit and using clean sand for traction on new concrete instead of heavy deicer, so that's the plain advice I leave you with when we pack up.