Providence Concrete Removal

Concrete Demolition

Concrete demolition is the loud part of the job, and it's where a crew either knows what it's doing or finds out in front of you. Before anything gets broken we saw cut a clean edge, so the slab you're keeping doesn't crack out along with the one that's leaving. A four inch patio is a jackhammer and a morning. Six or eight inches with rebar running through it is a breaker attachment on the machine and most of a day. Older Providence work hides things: a gas line under a walkway, granite curb nobody recorded, a slab poured tight against your neighbor's foundation. We're concrete contractors in Providence, so we dig and mark first. Rushed concrete demolition services shear pipes and crack basement walls, and that's a worse morning than the slab you called about.

Hydro Demolition

Hydro demolition is how we take out failing concrete without wrecking the good material underneath it. High pressure water, generally in the 15,000 to 40,000 psi range, chews the deteriorated concrete out and leaves the rebar clean and the sound slab unfractured. A jackhammer can't tell the difference between rotten and solid, and every blow micro-fractures the surface you're about to bond new material to. That's how a parking deck patch lets go in three winters.

The part nobody warns you about is the water. A deck job puts hundreds of gallons an hour on the ground, and that slurry runs high pH and full of fines, so we contain it, vacuum it and haul it off. It does not go down a storm drain toward the river. Like most concrete contractors in Providence, we keep this work to the warm months.

Concrete Demolition Removal

Concrete demolition removal is really two jobs sharing one name: breaking the slab up, then getting every pound of it off your property. A 4 inch slab weighs roughly 50 pounds a square foot, so that innocent looking 400 square foot patio is about ten tons of debris, and it doesn't fit in the back of a pickup no matter how optimistic you feel on a Saturday.

We plan the haul before the first hammer drops. Where the truck sits, whether we can get past the neighbor's fence on a tight East Side lot, how the rebar and wire mesh come out so nothing sharp is left in your yard.

Skip that planning and you get what I've seen from other concrete contractors in Providence: a tidy demo and a mountain of rubble sitting there until spring.

Robotic Demolition

Robotic demolition is what I send in when a machine has to stand where a person shouldn't. It's a remote-controlled breaker, electric, no exhaust to vent, narrow enough to fit through a 32-inch doorway and down the stairs of a College Hill basement or into an old Jewelry District mill. I run it from fifteen feet back with the control box strapped to my chest, closest thing on a job site to a video game controller, and nobody's under the slab when it lets go.

It earns its keep on interior footings, elevator pits and machine bases. Hand breakers might chew three days on a 12-inch pad. The robot's done by lunch.

Done badly, it hammers one spot and rattles the whole building, so we work edges inward, watch floor loading and keep water on the silica dust. Not many concrete contractors in Providence own one, so we get called onto other outfits' concrete demolition jobs too.

A 1 Concrete Cutting Demolition

Folks type a 1 concrete cutting demolition into their phone and land here, and I understand why: that search names a company, not a job. What you actually want is someone who can score a straight line and remove only the failing half of a slab. That's saw work. A walk behind saw with a diamond blade takes about four inches in a pass, fine for most sidewalks and patios. Thicker pours, or a garage floor with rebar in it, and we're on a wall saw.

Skip the cut and you telegraph cracks straight into the concrete you're keeping. Plenty of concrete contractors in Providence just start swinging, because breaking is faster than cutting.

We wet cut, chase the slurry, and most partial concrete removal of that size is cut, broken and hauled inside a day.

Northwest Rock And Concrete Demolition

Northwest Rock And Concrete Demolition is the kind of search you end up making when the slab isn't the only thing in your way, and around here that happens a lot. Dig past an old patio on the East Side and you can hit ledge, that hard gray granite the whole hill sits on, which shrugs off a handheld breaker the way Ortiz shrugged off a fastball. That's a hydraulic hammer on a mini excavator job, and rock runs three to four times slower than a four inch slab. So we separate the two: concrete demolition first, rebar cut and pulled, then the stone. Mixed loads get you charged as rock for the whole truck, and clean broken concrete can go out as fill instead. Vibration matters too, since a lot of Federal Hill sits on rubble foundations, so we work back from the neighbor's wall rather than into it. Most concrete contractors in Providence will price the slab and find the ledge later, which is how a two day concrete removal turns into a week.

What the job involves

Concrete removal starts before anybody swings a breaker. We look for what's under and around the slab first: gas line, water service, the sprinkler line somebody buried back in the nineties. Then we saw cut a clean edge where the old slab meets whatever you're keeping, because concrete cracks the way it wants, not the way you want, and a hammer with no cut line will run a crack straight into your neighbor's apron.

Then it's break it up, pull the mesh and rebar out of the pieces, load, haul off. On the East Side, where the drive is nine feet wide and street parking is a blood sport, we stage a truck rather than drop a dumpster for three days.

Two-car driveway, usually a day. Six-inch slab with rebar in it, longer.

As concrete contractors in Providence, we regrade and compact the subgrade before we go, because a rutted base is where the next slab starts failing.

What it costs

What concrete removal costs on your property comes down to three things: how thick the slab is, what's buried in it, and how hard it is to get off the lot. A 4-inch patio slab with no steel breaks up quick. An 8-inch driveway apron with rebar running through it fights back, and that's a longer day with heavier equipment. Access swings it just as much. If we can back a truck to the slab, good. If it sits behind a Federal Hill triple decker with a three foot gangway, that concrete leaves by wheelbarrow. Disposal gets weighed, so thickness costs you twice.

Anyone quoting a concrete removal cost per square foot over the phone hasn't seen your slab. Call me at (401) 394-6425 and I'll come measure it.

I'm not the cheapest of the concrete contractors in Providence, mostly because we haul every chunk out instead of leaving a pile behind the garage.

Why choose us for this

You've got a cracked slab or an old patio you're tired of walking around, and you want it gone once, by people you don't have to babysit. So here's what we won't do.

We won't move the number: the figure I give you at the walkthrough is the figure on the invoice, unless we hit something buried nobody could see, and you'll hear about that before we cut.

We won't split the crew: your concrete removal gets finished before we start anyone else's.

We won't lean on you to sign: the estimate costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

We won't leave the rubble: broken concrete goes out on the truck, not stacked at the curb for a month.

I'm not the cheapest quote you'll get. Hauling and disposal are real work. Like other licensed concrete contractors in Providence, we carry general liability and workers' comp, and I'll send the certificate over.

Frequently asked questions