Garage floor concrete in Tacoma WA - a slab built to carry your car and your gear

Most calls start with a floor that's split down the middle, dropped near the door or gone dusty and rough, and some start with a new garage that needs a floor. The price mostly turns on the size of the garage, whether an old slab has to come out first, how thick the new one needs to be and whether you want steel in it. The schedule turns on the weather, the wait before you can park on it and whether the city wants a permit for your job. If the driveway leading in is in the same shape, I can look at a new concrete driveway on the same visit, and either way you get your own figure in a written estimate.

At the estimate I ask what you'll park or store in the garage, because a small car isn't the same load as a work truck parked next to a loaded tool bench. I can quote the floor two ways, plain and with rebar or wire mesh, which is steel laid inside to hold the slab together, so you can see what the reinforcement adds to the price before you choose. On the job our crew breaks out and hauls away the old floor if there is one. Then we dig out the soft dirt and pack the subgrade, the ground the slab sits on, so the new floor doesn't settle along with it. We set the forms, pour, finish the surface and protect it while it cures, which is the slow hardening that gives concrete its strength, and before we leave I tell you plainly when it's fine to walk on and when the car can come back. If the budget gets tight, I'd rather you spend on the base than on a fancy surface, because nobody sees the base on day one but it decides whether the floor stays flat.

If you'd like color or a pattern instead of plain gray, that's decorative concrete, and I price it as its own line so you can decide on it separately. On a sloped lot where the garage is cut into the hill, concrete retaining walls can keep the soil back off the slab and the approach.

Tacoma's Planning and Development Services says most construction work needs a permit. Its list of work that doesn't names sidewalks and driveways but not garage floors, so that list doesn't settle whether replacing yours needs one. A new or replaced detached garage falls under the city's new building permit, which covers the floor poured with it. Digging out and bringing in gravel or fill for the base counts as grading and fill, which the city reviews under the residential building permit, and moving more than 50 cubic yards of cut or fill takes a separate site development permit. Where a permit applies, the city reviews the plans, approves them and then inspects the work against them. Before work starts we check which office covers your address and what it will want to see. When the job calls for a permit we handle the paperwork, and if it's one you have to get yourself, I tell you what to bring. The office takes walk-ins from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Monday through Thursday, on the third floor of the Tacoma Municipal Building at 747 Market Street.

Plenty of the garages we see around Tacoma are older detached ones off an alley or down a sloped driveway. On those, getting concrete to the slab is often the hard part, so I look at access at the estimate and plan how we'll get it there. We run into the same tight, older lots on jobs in Fircrest and University Place. We're based in Tacoma and work in the cities around it in Pierce County and south King County, so if you're not sure we come out your way, just ask.