Denver ADA Ramp Contractors

You usually find out one of three ways. A tenant improvement goes through plan review and the entrance comes up. A customer sends a letter. Or a maintenance tech finally puts a level on the ramp everyone complains about and it reads well over what's allowed. Same question either way: what's the smallest correct fix, and is a bigger one worth doing while the entrance is torn up anyway?

That's the conversation we're good at. We build and correct accessible routes for commercial and multifamily property throughout Denver, from small storefront entries in the Highlands to community walk systems in Central Park. We measure first, tell you what the numbers actually say, then lay out the options with their real trade-offs instead of pushing the biggest scope.

The decision behind most ramp calls

An accessible route is a chain. Parking stall, access aisle, curb ramp, walk, landing, ramp run, door approach. One link out of tolerance breaks the route, and owners spend money on the wrong link because the failing one is less obvious. We've watched a perfectly good ramp get rebuilt when the real problem was cross slope on the walk feeding it.

So we measure the whole chain before recommending anything. Sometimes the answer is genuinely small: grind a lip, reset one panel, add detectable warnings at the curb transition. Sometimes the walk has settled far enough that patching it throws money at a base problem. Twenty minutes with a level and a tape sorts that out, and it's free.

Four ways to fix a non-compliant entrance

Why Denver ramps drift out of tolerance

A ramp that measured correctly on inspection day can fail years later without anyone touching it. Our soil moves. A run poured on clay that wasn't properly based settles at the bottom landing, which steepens the run above it just enough to matter. Freeze-thaw does the opposite up top, heaving a panel into the quarter-inch lip that stops a wheelchair caster cold.

Property age shows up plainly. Older commercial frontage in Berkeley, Park Hill, and around University Hills often has ramps retrofitted into walks poured long before anyone measured cross slope, done with a shovel and good intentions. Newer parcels in Central Park measured right on day one, so when they fail it's settlement rather than layout. Cherry Creek entries are the tight ones: little room between the door and the property line, which is where relocating a route stops being simple.

What we measure before we quote

• Running slope on every ramp segment, taken at multiple points instead of one
• Cross slope on the walk, the landings, and the access aisle
• Landing dimensions at the top, bottom, and any direction change
• Clear width along the route, including where planters and bollards intrude
• Vertical changes in level at every joint and panel transition
• Handrail condition, height, extensions, and how the posts are anchored
• Detectable warning panel presence, condition, and placement at curb transitions
• Where water runs across the route and where it refreezes in winter

Scheduling ramp work in Denver

Ramps are small pours with tight tolerances, so weather matters more than the volume suggests. Spring through October is our comfortable window, and the shoulder weeks are best because a moderate day buys a long finishing window, and slope correction is all finishing. Summer afternoons get watched. A storm on a fresh ramp means scaling right where people put their wheels.

Winter ramp work happens because accessibility problems don't wait for April. We form, heat the mix water, blanket the pour, and hold traffic off it longer than we would in June. We won't place on frozen ground. If your entrance is unsafe in January, we'll build a compliant temporary route while the permanent work waits for a workable window, and we'll say so plainly rather than pour something we'd have to redo. Anything reaching into the sidewalk means the city's right-of-way permit, so we start that early.