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Concrete services in Lincoln and southeast Nebraska
Everything below is work our own crew does. Nothing gets subbed out and marked up, and nothing gets priced until somebody has stood on the job.
Driveways
The driveway is the biggest piece of concrete most people ever buy, and around here it takes the worst service of anything on the property. Car and truck loads, a freeze-thaw cycle most winter nights from late November to March, brine and salt tracked in off the street, snowmelt running across it every thaw. Built right it goes thirty years. Poured three and a half inches thick straight onto the loess with no steel, it's a patchwork by the time the mortgage is half paid.
New pours, full tear-out and replace, and widening strips are all everyday work. On a replacement we break out the old slab, haul it off, dig to grade and bring in compacted granular base.
A word on widenings, because that's where corners get cut most. A new strip poured tight against a twenty-year-old driveway is two slabs that move differently, since the old one finished settling a long time ago. Done right there's an isolation joint between them and drilled dowels holding the elevations together. Done wrong you've got a lip and a water channel in two winters.
Typical range: $8–$14 / sq ft · $5,000–$10,000 for a two-car.
Patios & walkways
Back patios, extensions off a slab that's already there, side walks, paths out to a shed, fire pit surrounds and hot tub pads. This is the work that makes a backyard worth sitting in, and in the newer additions across southeast Lincoln it's most of what we do.
Two things decide whether a patio is still good in fifteen years. First is what's underneath. On a newer lot that means dealing honestly with the backfill zone beside the foundation instead of pouring across it and hoping. That strip got dug out for the basement and put back loose, and it keeps settling for years. Pour straight over it and the patio tips back toward the house, which then delivers roof water to your foundation wall.
Second is slope. A patio has to shed water away from the house, somewhere around an eighth to a quarter inch per foot. Get that wrong and it ponds, freezes, and eventually sends water somewhere expensive.
We broom-finish anything you walk on. A smooth trowel finish photographs beautifully and it's genuinely dangerous outside in a Nebraska January.
Typical range: $8–$14 / sq ft · $1,900–$3,400 for a 12×16.
Approaches & sidewalks
The strip between your driveway and the street, the curb cut it runs through, and the public walk across your frontage all sit in the public right-of-way. That makes them a different kind of job: permitted, inspected, and poured to the city's spec for thickness and slope, plus cross-slope limits on walks for accessibility. In the city that's Lincoln. Out on a county road it's the county, because the approach is in their right-of-way.
It's also the part of a driveway that fails first, since it takes the turning loads of every vehicle coming in off the street plus the plow and the salt.
Here's the part that surprises people: the property owner is generally the one responsible for maintaining the public walk across their frontage. If you've had a notice about a sidewalk defect, bring it to the estimate and we'll scope exactly what it asks for and nothing more. Single panel replacement is usually possible. There's rarely any need to redo a whole run.
Typical range: $1,200–$3,000 approach · $9–$16 / sq ft sidewalk.
Steps & stoops
Steps are what we get called about most in the older neighborhoods. The Near South, Everett, University Place, Havelock, College View. And they're nearly always failing for the same reason: the footing doesn't go deep enough.
A step run on a shallow footing gets picked up by frost every winter and set back down a little differently every spring. Do that fifty times and the rise between treads is all over the place, which is annoying and is also how people fall. The depth a footing has to reach is set by whoever inspects the work, and in eastern Nebraska it's a real depth, not a formality, so we check the current number rather than going off a rule of thumb.
Stoops on newer houses fail differently. They're sitting on the backfill beside the foundation and the fill kept consolidating, so they tip toward the house. Same symptom, different cause, different fix.
We rebuild on footings below frost depth, consistent rise and run the whole way, a slight forward pitch on each tread so water leaves, a finish with real texture, and the railing provision poured in rather than drilled later. If the concrete's sound and it's only settlement, lifting is often the better value and we'll say so.
Typical range: $1,800–$5,000 rebuild · $600–$2,500 to lift one.
Garage & shop floors
Interior slabs get judged on things outdoor flatwork never faces. A garage floor deals with cars dripping brine all winter. A shop floor might need to carry a two-post lift, a loaded trailer, or a tractor.
Both need a vapor barrier under them, and that's the detail skipped most often. It's why so many older garage floors around here sweat every spring and won't hold a coating, and it matters even more in the low ground out by Crete, Milford, Ashland and Greenwood where there's more moisture to move. You can't add one later without taking the floor out, so it's a small line item now or a whole floor later.
Our standard for a working shop is six inches over compacted base with a #4 rebar mat on chairs, 10 to 15 mil of vapor barrier lapped and sealed, joints laid out to keep panels roughly square, and slope to a door or a drain so water actually leaves. If a lift is going in, the post locations need thickened footings poured as part of the slab. Retrofitting that means cutting your new floor apart. If it's getting in-floor heat, the tubing gets tied down and pressure-tested before any concrete touches it.
Tell us what's going on the floor. Sizing it right at the estimate costs a little. Finding out at year six costs the floor.
Typical range: $8–$15 / sq ft garage · $9–$16 shop.
RV & equipment pads
Camper and boat parking, shed and outbuilding slabs, hot tub pads, generator pads, and the little slab under a replacement AC unit. Pads look like the simplest thing we pour and they have the highest rate of being done badly, because they're exactly the job people hand to whoever gives the lowest number.
What matters: thickness matched to the load, five inches minimum for an RV and six for a big fifth wheel or anything on a tandem axle. Drainage, so you're not parking on an ice sheet every February. A clean tie-in to the existing driveway with an isolation joint and dowels so the two slabs stay level instead of stepping apart. And reinforcement, because jacks and stabilizers put concentrated point loads on a slab and a sidewalk section won't take that.
Hot tub pads need the filled weight, not the empty weight. It's usually several times what people assume once you add water and people, and it needs to sit dead level, which means handling drainage around it instead of through it.
Typical range: $3,000–$7,500 RV pad · $500–$1,800 shed or hot tub.
Stamped & decorative
Stamped patterns, integral color, banded borders, exposed aggregate. It looks like flagstone or cut stone or brick, and underneath it's one slab, so there's nothing to heave apart and no weeds coming up between pavers.
We're happy to pour it. You should hear the maintenance conversation first though, because that's where the disappointment comes from three years in. In a freeze-thaw climate decorative work is more exposed than plain gray, not less. Stamped texture holds water and that water freezes. Color wears unevenly. Any decorative slab here wants a sealer, and sealers need redoing every two to four years to keep working. Skip it and the color goes chalky, the sheen gets patchy, and the low spots start taking freeze damage.
What we suggest most often is restraint. A stamped or exposed border around a plain broom-finished field, or integral color with a light texture instead of a full stamp. It reads as a deliberate design, costs a good bit less, and holds up better through our winters than a fully stamped driveway. On anything that sees street salt, a penetrating siloxane beats a film-forming sealer, because it works inside the concrete instead of sitting on top waiting to wear off.
Typical range: $14–$24 / sq ft depending on pattern and color.
Repair & replacement
Not everything needs replacing, and we'd rather say so than sell you a tear-out. What we fix regularly:
- Routing and sealing cracks. The right fix for a stable crack in a sound slab. It keeps water out, and water is what makes a crack widen.
- Panel replacement. Saw-cut clean at the joints, pull the bad panel, fix whatever caused it, pour a match. Standard on walks and driveways where the failure is in one spot.
- Slab lifting. Fill the void under a settled but sound slab and bring it back to grade. Often a fraction of replacement, and around Lincoln it's the right call more often than people expect, because so much of the settlement here is really a drainage problem.
- Resurfacing. A bonded overlay on a slab whose structure is fine but whose surface has scaled recently. Roughly a third to half of replacing it, and you pick the texture.
- Trip edges. Grinding or panel replacement, depending on what lifted it and whether that's still happening.
- Removal and haul-off. Taking concrete out and not replacing it, for a patio you'd rather have back as yard.
The one thing we won't do is put a repair on a slab that's going to fail anyway. That comes up a lot in the older parts of town, where plenty of flatwork predates air entrainment being standard and has been quietly losing its surface for eighty winters. An overlay needs sound concrete to bond to. A scaled surface isn't sound by definition, so the overlay comes off in sheets in a couple of seasons. When that's what you've got, we'll say so, even though the bigger job isn't what you were hoping to hear.
Typical range: $300–$1,000 crack repair · $450–$1,400 per panel.
Questions about these services
Can I combine a few of these into one job?
Yes, and it's usually the cheapest way to buy concrete. A big share of any flatwork price is just getting the crew, forms, equipment and trucks to your house. Doing the driveway, the side walk and the front steps on one trip costs noticeably less than three visits, and the finishes match because it's one pour on one day.
Rebar or wire mesh?
Depends on the job, and honestly mesh gets used more than it should. For a normal residential driveway on a decent base we spec #4 rebar on a two-foot grid, up on chairs. Mesh is fine on small pads but only if it's actually held up in the middle of the slab, and in practice it ends up walked down into the dirt where it does nothing. Fiber in the mix helps with shrinkage cracking but it doesn't replace either one.
What thickness do I need?
Four inches is a car driveway or a patio. Five if you park a full-size truck, a work van, or anything towing. Six with rebar on a grid for a shop floor, an RV pad, or anywhere a tractor or skid steer runs. Going four to five on a normal driveway adds a modest amount and roughly doubles the load it carries before it cracks. It's the one place in a bid where spending more is almost always right.
How soon can I use it?
Foot traffic in 24 to 48 hours. A car at about seven days. Heavy trucks, trailers, RVs or a dumpster at 28 days. Those stretch in cold weather because concrete gains strength slower as it gets colder, so a late-fall pour gets its own dates rather than the generic ones.
Do you do commercial work?
Light commercial, yes. Dumpster pads, approach aprons, sidewalks, accessible ramps, equipment and generator pads, small loading areas, and repair work for property managers. Big structural and tilt-up is a different trade with different equipment. Tell us the job and we'll say straight away whether it's in our lane.
Towns we cover
Everything on this page is available anywhere we work. Pick your town for local detail on soil, permits and the concrete problems particular to it.
Got concrete that needs work?
Tell us what you're looking at and we'll tell you what it needs, what it costs, and when we could get to it.