Englewood Walkway Contractors

Quarter to seven in the morning and there's a crew in your front yard with no concrete anywhere in sight. That throws people. The truck isn't due for another two hours, and those two hours are the ones that decide how your walk turns out.

Front walks are small pours that move fast. A driveway gives a crew room and time; a ribbon three or four feet wide has edges on every side, stiffens quickly, and offers exactly one shot at each step. We pour plenty of them around Englewood, swapping out heaved strips in Northwest Englewood and running new paths across the deeper front yards in Broadway Estates and Cherry Hills Vista. So here is the day, start to finish.

Everything finished before a truck turns onto your street

• Locates marked and the sprinkler zone under that strip shut down
• Old walk sawed free, broken out, and the pieces gone the same morning
• Subgrade cut and packed the full width of the forms, edge to edge
• Base rock placed and compacted, depth checked at both ends of the run
• Forms staked to line and to grade, with fall set away from the house
• Mesh or bar chaired and tied wherever the run calls for it
• A safe route to your front door worked out, and you told where it is
• Boards, plastic, brooms, and edgers staged before anybody calls dispatch
• Mix and slump ordered on purpose, not accepted off whatever shows up

Placing a narrow ribbon goes quicker than you expect

The truck backs in and the whole placement is often over inside half an hour. Concrete comes down the chute in sections, gets raked roughly to height, and then the screed rides the form boards to pull it flat. On a walk we work in short pulls, because a long screed on a narrow form just bounces.

What people notice is how ugly it looks at that moment. Ridged, gray, wet, nothing like a finished walk. That's normal. The bull float knocks those ridges down and presses coarse stone down out of the way, and then the crew steps back and does nothing for a while. Waiting is the skill. Concrete tells you when it's ready and the penalty for arguing is permanent.

Four windows on a finishing day

Width, fall, and where the cuts land

Two decisions get made with a tape and a level before any of the above happens, and both show up every single day you use the walk. Width first. A three-foot path works for one person carrying nothing. Add a bag of groceries in each arm, or a second person, or a stroller, and three feet has you walking single file through your own front yard. We push people toward four wherever the yard allows it, and toward wider still at the door where people stand.

Then fall. A walk needs a slight tip across its width so water runs off one side instead of standing in the middle, and it wants to tip away from the house. Get this wrong on a narrow ribbon and you build an ice tray. Older Englewood walks that heave every winter are almost always walks that hold water, and water in the ground under a narrow strip is what lifts it.

Joints get cut close together on a walk, much closer than on a drive, and we lay them out so they land square to the direction of travel and hit any change in shape. Season: April through October is straightforward, early fall is the best of it, and a short run is easy to blanket if you need it done cold. Frozen ground is where we stop.