Anyone in the concrete business?

Looking to re-do my driveway, and do a new garage build.

Anyone here in the concrete business?

My driveway is 125 feet long and 12 feet wide. It's an L shape, and the back section is 40 feet....

Any rough estimates?

Some people say $3.50 to $5.25 per square foot. Your driveways in the $7500 or less cost? The pad and the garage I'm not sure of your footage.

I'm not in the concrete business, but I hire them all the time. I'm a General Contractor.

Prices for concrete work will vary GREATLY by region. Possibly by a factor of 3-4X. Residential work is NOT priced by the square foot, it is priced by the WAG Estimating method. (Wild Ass Guess). That means they will pull up to your curb, and guess how desperate you are and how wealthy you are, then shoot as high as they think they can.

You haven't told us what region you are in, and you haven't said whether the job would include demo, hauling, formwork, or just concrete pouring.

So no, no rough estimate.

You excavate, prepare base and form it, and its $100 to 250 per cubic yard, depending on where you are. Somebody else does all the prep, and its whatever they want to WAG it.

That $100-$250 could be way the berkeley off, too. Its been quite a while since I poured any concrete.

In reply to Streetwiseguy:

In 41 years in the construction industry working in 15 different states, I have never seen anyone charge by the cubic yard. (Although I sometimes think they should)

SVreX wrote: I'm not in the concrete business, but I hire them all the time. I'm a General Contractor. Prices for concrete work will vary GREATLY by region. Possibly by a factor of 3-4X. Residential work is NOT priced by the square foot, it is priced by the WAG Estimating method. (Wild Ass Guess). That means they will pull up to your curb, and guess how desperate you are and how wealthy you are, then shoot as high as they think they can. You haven't told us what region you are in, and you haven't said whether the job would include demo, hauling, formwork, or just concrete pouring. So no, no rough estimate.

Charlotte NC area.

It's currently gravel, and I don't plan on doing a single thing.

maybe somebody needs to send Margie an IM to ask her?

In reply to SVreX:

Interesting. Most of my involvement has had me as the "contractor" on smallish jobs, and the only involvement of the concrete guy is driving the truck and dropping the concrete. I've always paid by the yard.

Because Canada?

In reply to Streetwiseguy:

Ah...ok. So you are talking about the cost of the materials only. Yeah, that's not what he is asking.

Concrete materials are sold by the yard. Concrete jobs (including labor) are not.

mad_machine wrote: maybe somebody needs to send Margie an IM to ask her?

I see what you did there.

In the rest of the world do they sell concrete by the cubic meter?

Called a few places, and the ballpark numbers seem to be in the $10,000-$12,000 range.

Also looking to have a garage built, and probably called 25 people. Impossible to get someone to pick the phone up. Is business that good?

My driveway is about 50' long, and I have had estimates from $5K to $15k It really seems to be a free-for-all.

T.J. wrote: In the rest of the world do they sell concrete by the cubic meter?

Probably. It's a pretty similar number.

pinchvalve wrote: My driveway is about 50' long, and I have had estimates from $5K to $15k It really seems to be a free-for-all.

Yep.

And if you wait 30 days, the numbers will all change.

That $5K price was probably a guy who was a bit desperate. He may or may not honor that a month later.

T.J. wrote: In the rest of the world do they sell concrete by the cubic meter?

Assuming a ready-mix truck.

An awful lot of the places that use metric also hand mix their concrete at the site. In which case, you buy it by the bag (or tractor trailer load).

"Places that use metric (in construction)" = "Places that aren't US or Canada"

I can check with Janel, her parent company is based in Ireland. I believe they use trucks there as well as in Europe.

She's in the ready-mix supply business, but they don't do installation so I can't offer any insight in costing. They mostly do asphalt but she'd do concrete for her own driveway, I know that.

When getting my driveway repaved I contacted 4 companies to give me quotes and they varied greatly. I have a smallish driveway and the quotes to replace and make wider were $1800-$5500.

Best bet is to get a few competing quotes. Any home improvement project over $1500 I tend to get at least 3 quotes on.

Update: Janel says that asphalt is sold by the metric ton in Europe, but she's pretty sure they still use cubic yards. I'll see if she can nail that down, because now I want to know!

Andy Neuman wrote: When getting my driveway repaved I contacted 4 companies to give me quotes and they varied greatly. I have a smallish driveway and the quotes to replace and make wider were $1800-$5500. Best bet is to get a few competing quotes. Any home improvement project over $1500 I tend to get at least 3 quotes on.

I was able to get two quotes, out of speaking with a ton of people.

It looks like 10-12k. About what I figured, so that's fine.

In reply to Keith Tanner:

Thanks. For some reason after reading some comments on a YouTube video about a logger tape measure, where people were arguing about metric vs imperial, the idea popped into my head that the second is a unit shared by both systems. I wonder why they didn't take a day and make it into 10 metric hours and each metric hour into say 100 metric seconds. I think it is because they would run into the fact that there are 365 days in a year and that is not very metric-ky, so they just decided to adopt seconds and let it go at that. They did do a nice job at metricizing time measurement for things less than a second. We all are familiar with milliseconds and microseconds, but I've never thought to measure time in 1/16ths of second or however an imperial system would do it. I guess they invented the metric system before we could measure time in fractions of a second.

T.J. wrote: I think it is because they would run into the fact that there are 365 days in a year and that is not very metric-ky,

there are actually 365.25 days a year, hence the need for a leap year every fourth calendar year

Every few years on April 1st, the National Research Council in Canada announces that they're going to metric time.

If you really want to screw someone up, give them a decimal foot tape measure. Janel has one - it's from the construction industry, ironically. If you're not paying attention, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble when 1.9' is not the same as 1'9".

110 foot x 20 which was the patch panel on mine that the city paid for as they tore up my driveway was bid out at ~9500$ including the tear out of the old driveway.

In reply to Keith Tanner:

"Decimal foot tape measure"... never heard it called that before. AKA Engineer's Tape (tenths of a foot instead of inches)

Grade work and elevations are done in tenths, not inches.