The floor the framing crew never worried about
A garage slab isn't tied to your foundation. It floats inside the stem walls, sitting on whatever fill got pushed back in after the foundation was poured. In Castle Rock, where most houses went up between the 1990s and the 2020s, that fill is still young. Construction backfill consolidates for years after the builder moves on, and the garage slab, poured over the deepest fill on the lot, settles right along with it. Plenty of the garage floors we lift are in ten-to-twenty-year-old Castle Rock houses, not 60-year-old Denver ones. The concrete is fine. The ground it was trusted to is the part that keeps changing its mind.
Reading the crack pattern
Most homeowners call us about a crack, not a slope. Fair enough; the crack is what you see when you park. But the crack is the symptom. The slab lost its bearing on the soil below, spanned the gap like a bridge deck, and broke under the weight of the vehicle. On an estimate we check three things: how far the slab has dropped at the walls, whether the pieces still line up with each other, and whether there's an open void under the apron where water gets in. Cracked slabs lift fine. We bring both sides of the crack back flat to each other, checking the floor after every pump until it reads level.
Why Castle Rock garages get it worse
Elevation, mainly. At 6,220 feet this is the highest and coldest town we serve, with day-night temperature swings big enough to freeze and thaw the soil at the garage apron over and over through winter. Meltwater slips under the door, finds the apron joint, and erodes the base just inside it. Then the Dawson Formation clay layers underneath swell with the wet spring snows and shrink through the dry months, so the slab is losing support from two directions at once: washout at the front, shrinking clay beneath.
The lift, without emptying your life onto the driveway
We raise settled garage slabs through 1-1/2 inch drilled holes, pumping a water and sandy loam soil slurry until the floor comes back to grade, then patching the holes flush. Mudjacking handles up to 12 inches of settlement, which covers nearly everything we see in town. What the job asks of you:
- Clear access to the slab. If the garage is full, shift things to one side and we'll lift in two passes.
- A short wait for the car. Trevor will tell you at the estimate when it can come back in.
No jackhammer, no dumpster, no week of cure time, and nothing stored in the garage has to leave the property.
One more thing while the truck is parked outside: if you've been thinking about an epoxy or polyaspartic coating, do the lift first. Coating a settled slab locks in the slope, and any later repair drills through your new finish. Level first, coat second, and the patched holes disappear under the coating entirely.
Dollars, and the honest cutoff
Castle Rock garage lifts are priced by slab area and how far the floor has dropped, quoted free and in person. Tearing out a garage slab means demolition inside a finished structure, hauling rubble through the door opening, a new pour, and days of cure before you can park. It costs two to three times the lift and puts the new slab on the same still-settling fill. Past 12 inches of drop, though, the slab's relationship to the walls becomes the problem, and we'll recommend replacement instead of pretending a lift solves it.
Have Trevor take a look
Estimates are free, in person, and quick. We've been quoting these since 1988, and Trevor still does every estimate in person. If you're still diagnosing, our piece on fixing low spots on a garage floor covers what you can check yourself, and the garage floor leveling page covers the method in more depth. Otherwise, call (303) 526-2222 and get on the schedule before the crack gets company.