A dropped slab under a finished basement, fixed without wrecking either
Half the basements we see in Centennial were finished sometime in the last thirty years: drywall, carpet, a rec room, maybe a bedroom for a teenager. So when the floor slab settles, every repair quote the homeowner collects starts with demolition, and the problem gets lived with for years instead. Our approach skips the wrecking bar. We lift the existing slab from below through 1.5" holes, keep the drilling clear of your finished perimeter, and put the floor back to grade in one to two days. The drywall never finds out we were there.
Why the slab moved in the first place
Centennial's clay is the engine. Wet years swell it; dry stretches shrink it until it pulls away from the underside of the slab, leaving a gap the floor eventually sags into. Homes near the Cherry Creek and Piney Creek drainages get a second push: spring melt moves water through the soil on its way to the creeks, and moving water carries fines with it. Between the shrink and the wash, a basement slab poured in 1980 has had a lot of chances to lose its bed.
The signs tend to arrive in a familiar order:
- A dip you can feel underfoot along one wall or out in the middle of the room.
- Cracks tracking the expansion joints and opening a little wider each year.
- Basement doors that rub the floor or drift on their own.
- Water finding a new low spot whenever the washer drains or the melt comes through.
The question we settle before quoting anything
A sunken floor slab and a moving foundation look similar from the top of the stairs and cost very different money. So the first minutes of every Centennial basement estimate go to the walls. Stair-step cracks at the corners, upstairs doors that quit latching, windows binding in their frames: those are structural tells, and when we see them we stop quoting and tell you to bring in a structural engineer before spending a dollar on the floor. Pumping slurry under a slab while the walls move would only bury the real problem, and burying problems isn't how a company stays recommended since 1988.
Most of the time, though, the walls check out fine and the floor is the whole story. That's a mudjacking job, and it's one of our favorites.
What it costs and how the work goes indoors
Most Centennial basement lifts run $600 to $2,500, driven by the size of the lift area and the volume of void beneath it. Hold that against demolition and re-pour inside a finished basement, which climbs well into five figures once new flooring and trim repair join the bill, or against underpinning, which starts higher still.
Indoors, our process tightens up rather than changes. We tarp the route from the door to the work area before the first hole gets drilled. Holes go in every 4 to 6 feet across the lift zone and stay away from finished walls. Carpet or tile over the work area comes up first; bare slab needs no prep at all. The mix is Portland cement, sand, and topsoil, with no solvents and no foam chemistry, so nothing cures in your rec room that doesn't belong in a house with kids in it. Once the floor reads level, the holes get patched flush, and carpet, tile, epoxy, or plank flooring goes right back over them. The floor takes foot traffic the same day we wrap up.
January might be the best month to book this
Basement lifting is indoor work, which makes it the one service Centennial's cold nights can't slow down. Frozen ground pauses our outdoor drilling a day here and there through winter, but the basement calendar runs straight through the deep freeze, and it's usually the softest schedule of the year. If the floor has bothered you since last spring's melt, winter is the easy time to fix it.
Estimates cost nothing and happen at your house. Trevor walks the floor with a level and a steel rod, reads the walls, and tells you which of three things you own: a slab worth lifting, a void worth filling before it becomes a drop, or a structural question that needs an engineer before it needs us. Any lift we do carries the five-year written warranty. Call (303) 526-2222 or request the estimate, and if you want the method in full detail first, it's on the basement floor leveling page.