Concrete Removal & Replacement in Southeastern Wisconsin

Replacement is about a third of our workload, which means we spend a lot of time looking at what other people poured. The pattern almost never changes: the concrete did not fail, the thing underneath it did. Too thin, no reinforcement, a base nobody compacted, or water that was never given anywhere to go.

That matters because it decides what you should buy. Replacing a slab without fixing what moved it is paying full price to start the same clock again.

Repair or Replace

Some of this is genuinely repairable and we will say so. What tips it to replacement is usually one of seven things, and most failing slabs have several at once.

Cracks that have gone from hairline to wide, or that have started intersecting across the slab. Sections that have settled out of plane with each other. Spalling, where the surface flakes away after years of freeze-thaw and de-icing salt. Water that stands instead of draining. Patches that have already been done and already failed. A slab old enough that it is showing all of the above at once. And the honest one: you are redoing the exterior anyway and the concrete is what is letting it down.

One or two of those on an otherwise sound slab is a repair conversation. Four of them is a slab telling you the base is gone.

Tear-Out & Haul Away

We break out the old concrete, load it, and take it away. The site gets left clean, and we protect the lawn and the apron on the way in and out rather than leaving you with ruts to sort out afterward.

Tear-out is also the diagnostic. Once the slab is off we can see the subgrade, and that is when we know whether we are looking at a base that needs recompacting, a drainage problem that needs a grade change, or soft fill that has to come out. If we find something that changes the job, you hear about it that day, standing there, before anything gets poured over it.

Freeze-Thaw Crack Replacement

Southeastern Wisconsin runs dozens of freeze-thaw cycles a year. Water gets into concrete, freezes, expands and pushes the surface apart from the inside, and every cycle makes the next one easier. Add rock salt and it accelerates.

The replacement is where you fix that properly: air-entrained concrete so the expanding water has somewhere to go, grade that moves water off the slab instead of holding it, and joints placed so the slab can move without tearing. Then no de-icing salt the first winter, and sand after that.

The Repour

New base compacted, drainage corrected, reinforcement in, forms set, joints planned before the truck arrives. Thickened where vehicles turn or where a delivery truck will sit. Finished to match whatever it ties into, so a replaced section does not read as a patch.

It is the same work as a new pour with one advantage: we already know exactly how the last slab failed, which tells us what this one has to do differently.