January 10, 2007
Concrete Work
K. and I have been talking about it for a long time; it needed to be done. Things weren't getting any better. Our house has a breezeway between the garage and the rest of the building that previous owners had put in using flagstone. We liked it when we moved in, but soon realized that the flagstone was chipping, the mortar between the stones was poor and broke apart easily, and the breezeway was difficult to clean.
We decided to replace it with a concrete pad. I had originally looked in the Dickinson yellow pages, and online. I called contractors, but they always seemed busy. Some never even showed up to give me a quote. Others gave me outrageous quotes.
"Sure, I'll do it for $15,000." I recall one fellow saying. I was discouraged about it, and it was one of those things that fell to the back burner.
However, last week, I called a concrete contractor in Dickinson named Carlos. He came out, and quoted us $4.50 a square foot. We got him down to $4.00 a square foot.
So they came out and pulled up the old stones (We're keeping them for a path to the pier out back) set up forms, put down rebar and poured, all in one day.
Carlos approached us and said he'd do the driveway also for $3.00 a foot. We haggled about it and asked him to throw in the breezeway too at $3.00 a foot. We finally settled at $3.12 a foot, for both jobs: The breezeway and drive.
So they brought in 30 yards of concrete - Three truck loads, and we have a new driveway, too.
The forms come off today - We park on the driveway tomorrow. (We drive on the parkway today).
Posted by Bob at January 10, 2007 06:41 PM