The ground under a Littleton driveway depends on the block
Littleton is one of the few towns in the metro where we check the map before we guess what went wrong under a driveway. Down along the South Platte, the valley terraces run sandy. Sandy base doesn't heave much, but it washes out from under a slab a little more every runoff season. Up on the benches, you're on expansive clay, swelling in wet years and pulling back in dry ones like clay does across the Front Range. Two streets apart, two different reasons the same panel dropped.
The good news is the repair doesn't care which soil you're on. We drill 1-1/2" holes through the low panels, pump a slurry of water and sandy loam soil into the space the soil left behind, and raise the concrete until it reads level again. The holes get patched flush before we leave; Trevor will tell you when to drive on it.
Runoff season is when driveways here start moving
Every metro city gets freeze-thaw. Littleton gets freeze-thaw plus a spring runoff season, and that second act does most of the driveway damage in town. When the melt comes down and the groundwater rises, slab bases in the low-lying blocks get saturated. Wet base soil gives up its fines, the fines travel, and a driveway that felt solid in February shows a soft apron by May.
Freeze-thaw does its share too. Meltwater slips under a slab edge on a warm afternoon, freezes that night, and nudges the panel up a hair. Repeat that forty times a winter and the joints open, more water gets in, and the base loses a little more ground each cycle. A gap under the garage-door weatherstrip or a step-down where the apron meets the street means that cycle has been working on your driveway for a few seasons already.
What the ranch-era neighborhoods add to it
A big share of Littleton's houses went up in the 1950s through the 70s, and their driveways are on a second or third owner but still on the original base. Where a builder used fill to flatten the lot, that fill is tired now. It has compressed about all it's going to, and wherever water reaches it, it drops in chunks rather than evenly. In the ranch-house blocks it's common to find one panel sank an inch while its neighbor never moved. The difference is what's underneath, not the concrete.
Concrete from that era has one thing going for it: it was usually poured thick. A thick slab in one or two sound pieces is the best possible candidate for mudjacking, because it rises as a unit and keeps its new grade.
The dollars, straight
Every driveway gets its own number, quoted free and in person, because drop depth and void size drive the price. For a national yardstick, HomeAdvisor puts a typical residential mudjacking job between $300 and $2,500, with an average around $950. Tearing out and re-pouring the same driveway costs double or triple what a lift does, and the new pour lands on the same ground that just failed the old one. Three things set the number:
- How far it's dropped. More lift means more material under the slab.
- How big the void is. A washout running under three panels takes more slurry than one soft corner.
- How many panels are involved. Each gets its own drill pattern and its own read on the level.
Our pump truck carries 10 yards of material, which matters in Littleton more than most places. Runoff-season washouts are often bigger than they look from the surface, and we'd rather finish your lift in one sitting than leave mid-job for a refill.
When we'd tell you not to lift
A driveway broken into a handful of small pieces won't lift clean, and we'll say so standing in it. Same answer if the surface has scaled off across the whole slab, because new grade under a spent surface is wasted money. But a driveway that's low, cracked into a couple of big pieces, or tipping toward the garage is a lifting job. We've been making that call for Denver-area homeowners since 1988.
Have Trevor walk it
The estimate is free and happens at your driveway, not over the phone. Trevor measures the drop, figures out where the water has been going, and leaves you a written number. If drainage is part of the story, and near the Platte it usually is, he'll show you what to change so the lift outlasts the fix. Look through finished jobs on our work page, or start with the main driveway leveling page for the method in detail. Then call (303) 526-2222 and we'll get you scheduled.