The northeast corner of my customer pad came up an inch and a quarter over four years, and most of that time I blamed the base. It rocked a floor jack, puddled backward, and caught a customer’s air dam hard…

Two contractors stood on the same back patio and disagreed about whether it drained. One had a laser. The other carried a 4 foot level with a scrap of shim taped to one end, set it down four times, and…

Every November a question gets added to my order script, and I ask it on every ticket going up the canyon toward Manitou Springs: is the subgrade thawed and covered? If the answer is a confident yes from somebody who…

I have paid to pave the same 9,400 square foot yard twice in eleven years. The first time was $46,000. The second was $71,000, and that leaves out three days my tenant could not stage trucks and four patch calls…

The first slab I ever poured was a 10 by 12 shed pad in Mandarin, and I skipped the compactor on purpose. My reasoning, which I stand by as reasoning and not as engineering, was that the ground there is…

On a job off Kendall Drive in late September, the crew dug the turndown trench at eight in the morning. By ten there were six inches of standing water in it and nobody had touched a hose. The water table…

We dug a driveway out in Circle C two summers ago where the excavator hit limestone at 16 inches on the garage end and never touched rock at all on the street end. Eight feet of stiff brown clay down…