Concrete floor installation in Tacoma WA - a dry floor ready for what goes on top

Usually it's a basement with a dirt or broken floor, a shop or addition that needs a slab, or a room you're finishing and want to get right the first time. If it's the garage, our garage floor concrete page covers that work. The price moves with the floor's size, how easy it is to get concrete to it, how much base work the ground needs and whether you want it heated. The schedule turns less on the pour day than on the weather and the drying time before flooring can go down, and you'll get all of it in writing at the estimate.

First we talk about what's going on top of the floor, whether that's tile, wood, carpet, a coating or nothing at all, because that decides how we set the moisture barrier and where the joints go. Then we dig out and pack the subgrade, the soil the slab sits on, since a floor that settles takes your flooring down with it. The barrier goes down next. After the pour and the finish we cut control joints, shallow cuts that give the concrete a place to crack where we chose instead of across the middle of your room. Curing comes after that, the early wait while the concrete gains strength, and I'll be straight with you that the slab still needs drying time once it's cured before any flooring goes down. If the budget gets tight, I'd rather you save on the finish than on the base, because you can redo a finish later but you can't fix a base once there's a floor on it.

A new floor often changes the height at a doorway or back entry, so we can build concrete steps to meet it properly. If the project carries on outside to the pool, we pour concrete pool decks too, and we pay the same attention to the ground underneath.

Tacoma's starting point is that most construction needs a permit. The city's list of work that doesn't names driveways, sidewalks and tiling but doesn't mention concrete floors, so don't assume a new floor gets a pass. Before work starts we check which office covers your address and what it will want to see. When a permit is needed we handle the paperwork, or if it's one you have to get yourself, we tell you what to bring. We do the same check outside the city too, since we're based in Tacoma and work in the cities around it in Pierce County and south King County.

The ground counts as much as the paperwork. A Pierce County soils map says liquefaction, wet soil losing its strength when the ground shakes, typically happens in fill and in loose, sandy, water-soaked soil, the kind found in low spots near the shore, around lakes and along river valleys. On lots like that we dig in to see what's really under the floor before we settle on the base. If you want a heated floor, the state energy code requires insulation under the entire slab, so we plan for it before the base goes in. We look at ground and heating plans the same way on jobs in Fife and University Place.