Concrete Driveways in Englewood, CO

Englewood is an older inner-ring suburb immediately south of Denver, and its concrete reflects its age and its lot sizes. Lots are narrow by metro standards, many properties are alley-loaded, and a good deal of the original flatwork is well past the point where patching makes economic sense.

Alley-loaded garages produce a specific kind of job. The drive is a long narrow ribbon of concrete reached from the alley rather than the street, and access for a truck is frequently tight. Those ribbons were often poured without adequate control joints, which is why they tend to crack transversely at intervals the slab chose rather than the contractor. Replacement in a constrained alley costs more than the square footage suggests, because the access is the difficulty rather than the volume of concrete.

The narrow lots also make drainage a closer question than on larger properties. There is less distance between a new slab and the foundation, so slope away from the building has to be deliberate. On Front Range ground, where moisture change in expansive soils is the main driver of movement, a patio or walkway that ponds against a wall is a slow-acting problem rather than a cosmetic one.

Englewood is its own city with its own building department, so permitting goes there rather than to Denver or to Arapahoe County. As across the metro, work involving the public sidewalk, the curb or anything in the right of way falls into a separate and separately licensed category, and the contractor's competence at residential flatwork says nothing about whether they hold it.