The pump truck that's already in your neighborhood
Our shop sits on Russell Court, which means an Arvada driveway call is a home game for us. AAA Concrete Raising has worked out of this city since 1988, and Howard has walked driveways on most streets between Olde Town and the newer blocks out west. When your driveway drops, you're not waiting on a crew fighting its way across the metro at rush hour. We're minutes out, and odds are good we've lifted a slab on your street already.
What Arvada's creeks have to do with your driveway
Arvada is built on clay cut by the Ralston Creek and Van Bibber drainages, and that layout shows up in the driveways we lift. Clay swells when it takes on water and shrinks when it gives it up, and where the ground slopes toward a drainage, water keeps moving through the soil instead of sitting still. The routine call in this city is washout: an older downspout setup dumping roof water beside the driveway for years, quietly carrying the base out from under the concrete until a panel drops or the apron tips toward the street.
You'll usually spot it first as a widening gap under the garage-door weatherstrip, a crack forming near the garage, or a low apron holding water after a storm. All three mean the soil moved and the concrete followed it down.
Three generations of Arvada driveways, three different repairs
This city grew in waves, and each wave sinks a little differently.
- Olde Town and the early-1900s blocks. Narrow drives and older pours beside houses that have been through a century of downspout rearrangements. The base under these slabs has seen a lot of water come and go.
- The 1950s-70s ranch neighborhoods. The bulk of our Arvada work. Original builder driveways now 50 to 70 years old, sitting on clay that has cycled wet and dry hundreds of times. Sound slabs, tired soil. Ideal candidates for lifting.
- The 1990s-2000s builds out west. Newer concrete on newer backfill. When the grading was rushed or the fill went in loose, these driveways settle young, sometimes within their first decade.
The fix is the same across all three eras. We drill 1.5" holes through the low sections, pump a slurry of Portland cement, sand, and topsoil into the washed-out space, and raise the concrete while a level rides on the surface. Walk on it that afternoon. Park on it the next morning.
Spring is when Arvada driveways give up
Our busiest driveway season here starts with the upslope storms. Arvada sits at 5,340 feet on the foothill edge, and spring storms stack heavy, wet snow that melts in a hurry. All that water goes somewhere, and a lot of it soaks in right at the slab edges. Add the freeze-thaw cycling that runs from fall through spring, plus the wind off the foothills drying the clay hard between storms, and the soil under a driveway spends half the year swelling and the other half contracting. A slab can only ride that cycle so long before something lets go.
If your driveway came out of winter with a new low spot, deal with it before the next melt loads the void with water again. Voids grow, and the price of the repair tracks the size of the void.
The math on lifting versus tearing out
Most Arvada driveways we lift run $600 to $1,800. Demolishing and re-pouring the same driveway runs $7,000 to $15,000. Our rule for which side of that line you're on is simple. A driveway in a few large, solid pieces that's sitting low is worth lifting, and the lift holds for decades. A driveway broken into many small pieces, or one flaking and scaling across its surface, should be replaced, and we'll say so at the estimate rather than pump money under concrete that's done. Every lift we do carries a 5-year written warranty.
Get a number from the crew down the street
Trevor quotes every Arvada driveway himself, free and in person. He'll measure the drop, trace where the water's been coming from, and hand you a written price before he leaves, usually with a downspout fix thrown in as free advice. The crew that shows up has run our truck for years, and that truck carries 10 yards of material, plenty to finish any residential driveway in a single visit. Read more about how we level driveways, or request your free estimate and call (303) 526-2222. We're close.