Concrete steps construction in Springfield IL - a solid, even climb to your door

Most calls start with steps that have cracked, tipped toward the house or dropped away from the door, leaving a gap at the threshold where water collects. The price moves with how many steps you need, whether they're precast or poured, the size of the landing and how much old concrete has to come out. The schedule turns mostly on the weather, the cure time and any permit your address calls for. If the budget is tight, I'd rather trim the finish than the ground work, because a surface can be redone later but the support is buried under the concrete for good. If a cracked walk meets the bottom step, we can plan a new concrete sidewalk in the same job, and your estimate shows what you're paying for before we start.

We start by breaking out the old steps and hauling them away, then dig down to see what we're building on. Steps are only as solid as what's under them, so we settle the support before anything else, packing the subgrade the steps will sit on and setting whatever footing the job calls for. Then we lay out the whole rise from the walk to the door before the forms go up, because a small error repeated on each step adds up fast. We tie in rebar, steel bars that hold the concrete together if it tries to crack, then pour and shape the treads with a slight pitch so rain runs off instead of sitting. A broom finish goes on top, a light texture that gives your feet some grip on wet or icy mornings, and last comes curing, the wait while the concrete gains its strength before anyone walks on it.

Steps often meet other concrete work. On a new house the steps tie into the walls we pour during foundation installation, so planning the two together keeps the landing at the right height for the door. A stoop, porch or small addition may sit on a slab, and that's the same careful ground work we do in slab foundation building.

Steps that run out to a public sidewalk or reach toward the street need extra planning here, because the city's Office of Public Works issues a separate Excavation Permit that has to be in hand before any work starts in the public right-of-way, the strip of city land along the street. Springfield's code list also includes the International Residential Code, and adopted codes like that one can govern riser height, tread depth, landings and handrails, which is one more reason we lay out the full rise first. We check what the city or village office asks for at your address and take care of the permit paperwork for our work when a permit applies, and if the office needs something from you as the owner, we'll tell you early.

The ground deserves attention too. Where a building permit applies, the city's application makes the applicant and the owner responsible for looking into soil compaction and mine subsidence, the ground settling over old mine workings, and it names the Illinois Department of Natural Resources for more information. On older homes here, and on jobs in Chatham and Decatur, we often find steps that were set on loose fill and slowly pulled away from the house, so we dig and check before we form.