A tipped patio is quietly aiming water at your house
The patio behind a Littleton ranch doesn't announce that it's sinking. What you notice instead is the puddle. After a storm or a heavy melt, water sits in a crescent along the house side of the slab instead of draining off the back edge. That means the patio has tipped toward your foundation, and every gallon it collects gets delivered to the one place in your yard that can't afford it. Foundation repair bills make our slab work look like pocket change, which is why we treat a house-tipped patio as a now job, not a someday job.
Raising it back is quick work. One visit covers most patios. Holes get drilled through the slab at 1-1/2", our sandy loam slurry goes under pressure into the washed-out base, and the slab comes back up until water runs away from the house again. Trevor will tell you when you can get back on the patio.
What Littleton's spring does to a patio base
Patios sink here on a schedule, and the schedule is spring. Melt season pushes the groundwater up, and in the lower blocks near the South Platte the soil under a patio can stay saturated for weeks. Saturated base is weak base. Add the weight of the slab plus a few hundred pounds of furniture and planters, and the low corner finds a way lower.
Up on the bench neighborhoods the mechanism flips: clay under those patios swells through the wet months and shrinks hard in late summer, and the slab steps down a little with each cycle. Different soil, same result, same repair. The crack patterns usually give away which one you've got.
Downspouts start most of these jobs
Before we lift any patio, we look up. More often than not there's a downspout dumping roof water right at the sunken corner, and it's been doing it since the house was built. Water at the slab edge carries base soil away one storm at a time. Lifting the slab fixes the grade; moving that water fixes the cause. We'll tell you exactly where to extend the drain line, and it's a cheap piece of the puzzle you can handle yourself in an afternoon.
Get the drainage right and the lift lasts. The cured slurry is a dense, stable fill, and once the water path is closed there's nothing left eating the base.
The price of getting it back to grade
A patio lift runs roughly a fraction of what demolition and a re-pour cost, quoted free and in person. The number comes down to a few things:
- Drop and void size, since material is the biggest cost driver.
- Slab condition. One to three big sound pieces lift well. A patio in many small pieces doesn't, and we'll recommend replacement instead of taking your money.
- Finish. Stamped and colored patios lift fine. We patch the holes flush and tuck them into pattern lines where the lift allows.
We've been lifting Front Range concrete since 1988.
Why the age of the neighborhood matters
Littleton's 1950s-to-70s housing stock means a lot of original patios that have already survived fifty or sixty freeze-thaw winters at 5,390 feet. Concrete that old and still in big pieces has proven itself; the base under it is what gave up. That's the ideal setup for mudjacking, because we're replacing the failed part (the soil) and keeping the proven part (the slab). Newer patios in the river-adjacent subdivisions fail differently, usually from fast washout in sandy base, and they lift just as well.
One visit, one written number
Trevor comes out, measures how far the slab has moved, checks the drainage, and hands you a quote before he leaves the yard. No callbacks, no pressure. If the patio isn't worth lifting, he'll say that too. Read more about the method on the main patio leveling page, then request your free estimate or call (303) 526-2222.