Englewood Exposed Aggregate Concrete

You can date an Englewood house by its flatwork almost as reliably as by its windows. The little postwar ranches got plain gray. The sixties and seventies additions got washed stone, because that was the finish everybody wanted and every crew in Arapahoe County knew how to do. Sixty years later a lot of it is still down, which tells you something about the finish, and a lot of it is shedding pea gravel into the lawn, which tells you something about how it was built.

Those two facts are not in conflict. A washed surface is genuinely durable, more so than a broom finish, because the wear happens on stone instead of paste. What fails underneath it is the same thing that fails under everything here: no base, no steel, and a slab poured straight on dirt. We pour the finish those old walks had. We just put something real under it.

What we run into on each side of town

Northwest Englewood is where we do the most matching work. Narrow single-width drives, detached garages off an alley, and front walks that were poured in short panels. Homeowners there usually want a section replaced without the new work screaming at the old, so stone selection stops being decorative and becomes a matching exercise. We pull a sample off the existing slab, take it to the supplier, and get as close as the current rock inventory allows.

Broadway Estates leans toward full replacements. Wider drives, bigger slabs, and once you're tearing out a whole apron there's no reason to match anything.

Cherry Hills Vista is our new-work side. Bigger lots, more backyard, and washed stone showing up around patios and the walks that connect them. On a large patio we'll often run washed stone as a field with a hand-troweled border, which gives the eye a place to rest and gives you a smooth strip for furniture legs.

Wash day, and the weather that runs it

Everything about this finish hangs on one judgment call: when to start washing. Too early and you rinse stone loose and end up with bald spots. Too late and the paste has locked up and you're fighting it with a pressure washer, which cuts unevenly and leaves streaks. The window itself is not a fixed number of minutes. It's whatever the day gives us.

Dry Front Range air shortens it. Wind shortens it more, and wind is the variable people never think about. A steady breeze across a fresh slab pulls surface water faster than sun does, and on a windy afternoon the window can close in half the time we planned for. So we set windbreaks, we stage hoses before we need them, and on hot days we spray a surface retarder that holds the top paste open and hands us back control.

Season-wise, May through early October is the honest run, and fall is the sweet spot: mild days, cool nights, a slower window, and time to cure before hard freezes. Winter placement is possible with heated water, accelerator, and blankets, but the wash step makes it a poor bet, since you're dumping cold water on a slab you're working to keep warm.

How deep we take the reveal

How we keep a wash job from making a mess of your property

• Slurry is contained and collected, not run into the gutter or the flower beds
• Plywood and plastic protect adjacent flatwork, siding, and anything with a finish on it
• Hose routes planned before the pour so nobody drags a live line across fresh concrete
• Landscape rock and mulch tarped, because gray slurry does not wash out of bark
• Wash water directed away from the foundation and away from your neighbor's side yard
• Final rinse, sweep, and a walk of the alley approach before the trailer leaves
• Sealing scheduled for later, once the slab has had its 28 days