Sunken driveways, tripping sidewalks, tilted patios, and settled garage slabs — lifted back to level with high-density polyurethane foam or traditional mudjacking. Cures in 15 minutes. Drive on it the same day.
A licensed local crew — usually out in 24 to 72 hours. Written scope, fixed price, no pressure.
Last October I got called out to a 1998 two-story off Rea Road in Ballantyne. The homeowner had one of those situations you diagnose from the curb — the left side of a 26-foot driveway had dropped about an inch and a half at the garage apron, water was streaking the foundation stem wall in a dark vertical band right where the panel fell away, and the control joint between the two front panels had opened into a visible V. She thought she needed a new driveway. I laced a laser between the garage slab and the street, showed her the drop on tape, and told her we could pick the panel back up in an afternoon with polyurethane foam and she'd be parked on it before her husband got home from SouthPark. That is 80 percent of the concrete lifting calls I run in Charlotte. Somebody looks at a settled slab, assumes tear-out, and gets a quote from a concrete contractor who is happy to sell them a $9,000 replacement when the real fix is a couple hundred pounds of poly injected through 5/8-inch ports.
The other 20 percent is more interesting. Sidewalk trip hazards on 1920s Dilworth walks where the tree roots from a 90-year-old willow oak have heaved one panel three quarters of an inch above the next. Pool decks in Piper Glen where the coping is pulling away because the deck slab settled toward the shallow end and dragged the tile with it. Garage floors in Highland Creek that have separated from the foundation wall on the front edge — that classic half-inch dark line under the garage door where the weather seal no longer touches concrete. Patio slabs in Myers Park where somebody's grandmother poured a 20-by-20 pad in 1968 on top of the excavation spoil from the basement dig, no gravel, no compaction, and the whole thing has been slowly rotating toward the boxwoods ever since. AC condenser pads in Cotswold ranches that have listed so hard the compressor is running on the low side of its lubrication envelope. Porch slabs in Elizabeth pulling away from the front step and opening a two-inch gap you can drop a pen through. Every one of those is the same problem — a concrete surface that used to sit on soil is now sitting on air, because the soil moved and the concrete didn't. In Charlotte the reason the soil moved is almost always some combination of Piedmont red clay doing its shrink-swell dance and water running somewhere it shouldn't. We fix the void, we lift the slab back to grade, and the surface you already own goes back to work.
Recognize any of these?
Tripping edges between concrete slabs — sidewalk, driveway, patio
Water pooling against the foundation from a settled slab
Cracked, sinking pool decks and porch aprons
Garage floor separating from the foundation wall
AC condenser pad tilting away from the house
Uneven basement or ground-floor slab causing floor squeaks
A sinking slab is rarely just cosmetic. When a driveway apron drops even an inch at the garage, water that used to sheet toward the street reverses direction and finds the foundation wall. In Charlotte's wet season — think a March or November week where we take three inches in four days — that means saturated soil pressed against block or poured foundation, hydrostatic pressure loading up against the crawlspace vents on the low side of the house, and eventually moisture inside the crawlspace itself. I see this connection constantly. Homeowners in Highland Creek and Steele Creek who call me for a wet crawlspace turn out to have a settled driveway or a sunken patio driving the water there in the first place. Lift the slab, restore positive drainage away from the house, and the crawlspace moisture problem sometimes disappears without anyone touching the crawlspace.
The liability side is where it gets real. A raised sidewalk seam is a trip hazard, and North Carolina case law is not kind to property owners who leave a known hazard on their walkway. The ADA benchmark most municipal and code-enforcement folks reference is 1/4 inch of vertical displacement — anything above that is considered a trip hazard and, in a commercial or multi-family context, is a documented ADA violation subject to complaint and remediation order. On a private residential walk you're not going to get an ADA letter, but you are going to be the defendant when the DoorDash driver catches a toe and lands on your azaleas. In Mecklenburg County a homeowner can be held liable when a delivery driver, guest, contractor, or lawn crew member falls on their walkway, and I have watched two lawsuits over sidewalk trips settle for numbers that would have paid for lifting every sidewalk on the block. City of Charlotte code enforcement has jurisdiction over public sidewalks in the right-of-way, and if a neighbor complains they will issue a notice giving you a defined window to correct the hazard.
Then there is the way settling compounds. Once one driveway panel drops, the panels on either side lose the edge support that used to distribute their loads, and they crack next. What was one settled panel becomes three within two winters. A pool deck that's out of level stresses the coping, tears the caulk joint at the pool wall, and eventually pulls tile off the vertical face — a $600 lift becomes an $8,000 tile and coping repair if you wait long enough. AC condenser pads matter too. A compressor tilted more than a few degrees loses lubrication efficiency in the compressor bearings, runs hotter, and burns out years earlier than it should. HVAC guys in Charlotte routinely warranty-deny a compressor failure if the pad is visibly out of level, because the manufacturer's install spec requires level within 3 degrees. And resale — the Charlotte MLS is competitive enough that buyers and their inspectors flag a sinking apron immediately, right in the report, next to the moisture readings. It becomes a $3,000 to $5,000 concession at closing that a $700 lift would have prevented. Insurance carriers won't touch the settling itself — it's a maintenance issue, not a covered peril — but they will absolutely deny water damage inside the house if they can prove the intrusion came through a foundation that failed because a settled slab was directing water into it. I have seen the denial letters. Section on the policy called concurrent causation. Read your policy.
Same steps every job. No shortcuts.
measure grade change, drill-hole plan, quote before we touch anything
Two lifting methods work in Charlotte and we pick between them based on the slab, the access, and how the homeowner uses the space. The first is polyurethane foam lifting — the trade calls it polyjacking, poly, or foam lifting. We drill 5/8-inch injection ports through the slab on a 12- to 18-inch grid, thread the injection gun into each port, and inject a two-part high-density expanding polyurethane that reacts under the concrete and lifts it in a controlled way. We watch the elevation change in real time with a rotary laser and a receiver clamped to the slab edge, so we stop injection at exactly the target lift — usually to within an eighth of an inch. The foam reaches roughly 90 percent of its compressive strength within 15 minutes and the slab is drivable in 30 to 60 minutes. Standard residential lifts on Charlotte driveways run HMI TerraThane 24-024, the 4-pound-per-cubic-foot workhorse polymer, or Alchemy-Spetec AP Lift 430 for slightly higher density. For garage slabs, commercial pads, and anywhere we need higher compressive support, we step up to HMI TerraThane 24-046 at 6 pcf or Alchemy-Spetec AP Lift 475 at 4.75 pcf. Prime Resins Precision Lift 400 is what we run when the void is bigger than we thought and we need a slower-reacting foam so it flows further before it kicks. Uretek has their own proprietary system that gets sold under the Uretek Method brand — same category of polymer, different marketing.
The second method is traditional mudjacking, sometimes called slabjacking or stone-slurry jacking depending on who's calling it what. Old-school mudjacking used a slurry of Portland cement, topsoil, and water pumped through 2-inch ports drilled through the slab. The modern version uses a limestone-screenings slurry with cement and water, still through ports that are typically 1-5/8 to 3 inches across depending on the crew and the pump. The slurry cures in 8 to 24 hours and the slab is not drivable during that window. Mudjacking is cheaper up front on large-void jobs, works well for interior warehouse slabs and some big commercial patios where the weight isn't a concern and the aesthetic doesn't matter, and it doesn't require the specialized poly-injection rig. Where it falls short in Charlotte: the slurry adds significant weight to the same weak clay that let the slab drop in the first place, the 2- to 3-inch ports are dinner-plate visible even after patching, and the slurry itself can shrink or compress under years of load and let the slab creep back down. On a typical Charlotte residential driveway, sidewalk, patio, or pool deck I recommend poly nine times out of ten. Poly is waterproof, chemically inert, doesn't wash out with the next rain, doesn't compact under repeated vehicle loading, weighs about 5 percent of what a slurry backfill weighs, and reaches full cure before we finish loading the truck.
Port work matters. Poly ports at 5/8 inch get drilled with a diamond bit that leaves a clean edge — no spalling around the hole. We patch each port with a color-matched concrete cap using a rapid-set mix tinted to age with the surrounding slab, and on a weathered driveway they are essentially invisible after one Charlotte season. Old-school mudjacking ports at 2 inches leave a permanent visible circle no matter how well you patch. The hole itself is a stress riser in the slab surface. For that reason we won't run mudjacking on a decorative or stamped concrete surface at all — the ports will always show.
Void fill is a separate discipline from lifting. Some slabs don't need to come up — they just need the void underneath filled so they stop flexing under load and eventually cracking. Void fill uses a slower-reacting, lower-density poly (Alchemy-Spetec AP Fill 700, HMI TerraThane 24-006) injected with no lift target, just enough back-pressure to confirm the void is full. We run this on garage floors that are dead-level but sounding hollow underfoot, and on commercial floor slabs where the interior can't shift but voids beneath are causing joint spalling. Some jobs are lift plus void fill in sequence — bring the slab back to grade, then fill any remaining voids beneath the newly-lifted panel to lock it in.
Deep-injection is a related technique for stabilizing the soil column beneath a settling slab, not just the void directly under it. We drive small-diameter probes 4 to 12 feet down and inject high-density structural poly (Alchemy-Spetec AP Fill 720, Prime Resins Prime Flex 900 LV) at each depth interval. This is what we use under a foundation-adjacent porch slab where the whole soil column is compressible, not just the top few inches. Uncommon on residential driveways, common enough on commercial jobs and on Charlotte homes where the original excavation spoil was used as backfill and never properly compacted.
What we can't lift honestly: concrete that's already broken into free-floating pieces — the pieces will lift independently and separate further. Slabs where the surface is severely spalled with the top inch flaking off — even after lifting the surface will keep failing. Slabs being lifted from below by an active tree root — we can lift them but the root will re-lift them within a few years, so we address the root first (usually by cutting it and installing a root barrier) or we tell the homeowner honestly that this is a temporary fix. And expansion joints matter — an old driveway with Sika expansion-joint caulk that's failed will need re-caulking after the lift, because we've re-set the geometry across the joint. Bekaert wire mesh in old slabs is fine — it doesn't affect lifting either way — but heavily-rebared slabs (post-tensioned garage floors, some commercial pads) require careful port placement to avoid the tendons.
Charlotte slabs settle more than most metros for reasons that are baked into the geology and the weather. We sit on Piedmont red clay — technically a series of Cecil, Enon, and Iredell soil associations depending on where in the county you are — and this clay is what soil scientists call moderately-to-highly expansive. Plasticity index typically 20 to 35, sometimes higher in the Enon deposits. When it's saturated it swells; when it dries out it shrinks; and the volume swing between saturated December and bone-dry August can hit 15 percent or more in the top few feet. A slab poured on that soil is sitting on a substrate that changes size every season. Add in Charlotte's rainfall pattern — 42 to 48 inches a year, heavily concentrated in summer thunderstorms and shoulder-season fronts — and you get a substrate that's routinely going through a full wet-dry-wet cycle in a single calendar year. Slabs poured with proper compacted gravel base and drainage handle this fine for decades. Slabs poured on native clay with no gravel and no drainage, which is most of what got built in Charlotte from 1955 through the mid-1980s and a lot of what got built in the boom subdivisions of the 1990s, settle noticeably within 15 to 25 years.
Freeze-thaw is the other piece. Charlotte's official freeze depth per the NC Residential Code is 6 to 8 inches, and the code requires footings at 12 inches minimum for that reason. What actually happens under a slab is more nuanced. Water in the top 12 inches of soil freezes on and off through December, January, and February. Each freeze cycle expands the water by about 9 percent and the frozen soil heaves upward. Each thaw releases that heave. Under a driveway or sidewalk, this cycle creates and expands voids in the substrate, and each cycle makes the void a little bigger. Fifteen winters of freeze-thaw in a clay substrate with poor drainage will hollow out a slab base pretty thoroughly. That's why so many Charlotte slab-lifting calls come in February and March — the winter cycles just did their annual work on a substrate that was already tired.
Drainage direction matters more than most homeowners realize. Charlotte residential lots were graded in the 1950s and 60s with a general slope from house to street, and the driveway apron was poured to run positive down toward the street. Twenty-five years of soil creep, downspout dumping, irrigation over-spray, and general erosion later, that positive slope is often gone. Then the panel closest to the garage settles and now the slope is actively reversed — water runs from the street back toward the house. I've laced a laser across driveways in Beverly Woods and Madison Park where the apron at the garage was sitting two inches below the apron at the street, on a slab that was originally poured with three inches of fall in the other direction. That five-inch reversal is what's putting water in the crawlspace, not any single event.
Watersheds matter too. Ballantyne and southern SouthPark sit above McMullen Creek — clay-heavy, high water table in the low spots, driveways settle predictably along the creek-adjacent streets. University City and Highland Creek drain to Mallard Creek, which is more variable — some pockets of sandier soil where slabs are more stable, other pockets of pure Enon clay where they settle fast. The Elizabeth and Plaza Midwood corridor drains to Little Sugar Creek, which has been channelized and rerouted so many times over the past century that the actual subsurface drainage on any given lot is anybody's guess without digging. West Charlotte along Sugar Creek proper — same story, historically modified drainage, unpredictable substrate. Airport-adjacent neighborhoods along the western edge of the county sit on a locally high water table thanks to the flat terrain around Charlotte-Douglas — slabs there settle fast when they settle, because the substrate stays wet longer.
Where you live in Charlotte tells me a lot about what your concrete lifting job is going to look like before I even pull into your driveway. Ballantyne is my highest-volume neighborhood for residential driveway lifts, and it's not close. The bulk of Ballantyne housing stock went in between 1994 and 2005 — Piper Glen, the Ardrey Kell school district, the Rea Road corridor south of Ballantyne Commons, the Providence Country Club interior — and those subdivisions were built during a construction boom that didn't always leave time for proper subgrade prep under the driveways. What we see 20 to 25 years later is uniform apron settlement across the neighborhood, half-inch to two-inch drops at the garage, control joints opening up, and the classic Ballantyne pattern of the left front driveway corner settling harder than the right because that's where the downspout dumps. Piper Glen Homeowners Association has no restriction on slab lifting because we don't change the footprint or appearance meaningfully, but Providence Country Club and Ballantyne Country Club prefer notification if we're bringing a rig through the front gate. Streets I've worked on the most: Ballantyne Country Club Drive, Providence Country Club Drive, Ardrey Kell Road, Elm Lane, Rea Road proper south of the tollway.
SouthPark and the surrounding zip codes are a mixed bag — a lot of 1960s and 1970s brick ranches on Sharon Amity, Fairview, and the streets threading between Park Road and Sharon Road, and then a lot of newer infill and teardown-and-rebuilds on the same lots. The older ranches typically have small driveways with a single or two-car apron that settles at the garage the same way Ballantyne does, but with the added complication that the original driveway was often a narrow 8-foot ribbon that got expanded with a poured-on addition in the 1990s. Those seams between the original slab and the added slab are stress risers, and they settle differently — the newer poured section is on less-consolidated soil than the 1965 original. Sharon View Road, Fairview Road, and the interior streets of the Foxcroft neighborhood are common call areas. SouthPark commercial lot repair is its own vertical — we run lifting jobs on parking lots at Phillips Place, at the medical offices around Presbyterian Charlotte, and periodically at the Symphony Park perimeter drives when settlement gets bad enough to trigger tenant complaints.
Myers Park and Dilworth are where the interesting sidewalk work lives. These are Charlotte's historic streetcar suburbs — Dilworth platted in 1891, Myers Park platted in 1911 by Olmsted's firm — and the residential walks along Queens Road, Providence Road, Kings Drive, Selwyn Avenue, and Dilworth Road are the original 1910s-1930s concrete. Willow oaks and southern red oaks planted a century ago have root systems that reach 60 feet in every direction, and those roots have been lifting sidewalk panels since Eisenhower was in office. We do a lot of poly lifting on these walks — you can drop a panel back to grade around the root, or lift the surrounding panels up to meet it, depending on which way the trip hazard runs. Historic district design review has jurisdiction over exterior changes in Dilworth Local Historic District and in the Myers Park historic overlay areas, but slab lifting is generally not considered a modification requiring review because we're restoring the original grade, not changing it. That said, the color match on the port patches matters more in these districts than anywhere else in the city — the original 1920s concrete has a distinct aged gray tone and a slight aggregate exposure that we take pains to match.
Highland Creek and the northern subdivisions off Mallard Creek Road are the big-scope territory. Highland Creek proper is a massive master-planned community — thousands of homes built from the mid-1990s through the early 2010s — and the settlement patterns there are consistent enough that I can almost predict the scope from the street address. Homes built 1995-2000 on Highland Creek Parkway and the interior streets are hitting the 25-year mark and showing the same driveway apron settlement, garage-slab pull-away, and rear patio settlement Ballantyne shows. The Skybrook subdivision to the north has similar settlement patterns and an HOA that requires notification for any exterior work — a lift generally clears without incident but you have to ask. Wynfield and Waterford in the far north have similar issues on similar timelines. Steele Creek has the Berewick and Riverbend master-planned developments plus a lot of older stock along Steele Creek Road and Shopton Road — mixed settlement patterns depending on when the specific street was developed. University City is where I run the most partial-encapsulation-plus-slab-lifting combined jobs, because a lot of those 2000s builder-encapsulated houses also have builder-poured driveways that settled at the same rate the vapor barriers failed. Cotswold, Sedgefield, Madison Park, Beverly Woods, and Starmount round out the frequent-call neighborhoods — 1955-1975 brick ranches with small driveways, small patios, and a lot of AC condenser pad work because the original pads were 2-inch pours on native soil with no reinforcement.
We inspect and service the full Charlotte metro. Not sure your zip is covered? Call (980) 227-1769 — the answer is almost always yes.
We work well beyond the Mecklenburg County line for concrete lifting. The equipment is trailer-mounted, the material is portable, and a rig that can lift a driveway in Ballantyne can lift the same driveway 20 miles away without any additional setup. Matthews is 15 minutes east of Uptown and the housing stock ranges from 1970s ranches along Matthews-Mint Hill Road to 2000s subdivisions off Weddington Road — same settlement patterns as their Charlotte-proper counterparts. Mint Hill, 20 minutes southeast, is heavier on newer subdivisions and mid-2000s tract homes, and the driveway-apron settlement calls out of Mint Hill are almost identical to what we see in Highland Creek. Pineville, 15 minutes south, is a mix of older Pineville-Matthews Road corridor housing and newer Ballantyne-adjacent development.
North of the city we run into the Lake Norman towns — Huntersville at 25 minutes, Cornelius at 30 minutes, Davidson at 30 minutes. Housing there ranges from lakefront custom homes with elevated patios and pool decks (a lot of pool deck lifting work in the Cornelius and Davidson lake neighborhoods) to inland tract subdivisions with the standard driveway settlement issues. Concord in Cabarrus County (25 minutes northeast) and Kannapolis (35 minutes northeast) are a lot of 1990s-2000s subdivision stock, and Cabarrus County codes and permits are slightly different from Mecklenburg but the actual slab lifting work is identical. Harrisburg, at 25 minutes northeast, is smaller but consistent call volume. West of the county we cover Belmont in Gaston County (20 minutes west) and Gastonia (30 minutes west) — mixed older and newer stock. Fort Mill and Rock Hill in York County, South Carolina (20 and 30 minutes south respectively) are heavy call areas for us, especially the Fort Mill subdivisions off Highway 160 and the Baxter Village area — South Carolina building codes are different but again, the physical lifting work is the same. Union County covers Indian Trail (25 minutes east), Waxhaw (35 minutes southeast), Weddington (25 minutes southeast), Marvin, Stallings, and Wesley Chapel — all consistent call volume, all similar residential settlement patterns, all trip-billed within our standard service area.
Every Charlotte concrete-lifting job starts with a free on-site assessment. I show up with a rotary laser, a receiver, a moisture meter, and a probe. First thing I do is shoot the elevations across every panel and mark the drops in chalk so you can see exactly how much each panel has moved. Then I walk the drainage — where is water coming from, where is it supposed to go, where is it actually going. I probe for voids by tapping the slab with a small hammer and listening for the hollow tone that says the concrete is bridging air. I check for structural issues that would disqualify a lift — free pieces, severe spalling, active root heave. If it's a driveway I look at the garage apron and stem wall for evidence of ongoing water intrusion. If it's a pool deck I check the coping and the tile joint at the pool wall. If it's a sidewalk I measure the trip differential against the 1/4-inch ADA threshold. Everything gets photographed.
Back at your kitchen table you get a written fixed quote before any work is scheduled. Scope is broken down by panel or area — each panel gets its own lift target and its own line item so you can see what you're paying for and where. What you sign is what you pay. No add-ons after the fact, no surprise change orders once the crew arrives, no discovery invoices at the end. Compared to tear-out and replacement, lifting the same slab is a fraction of the cost and you're driving on it the same afternoon rather than losing the driveway for a week and paying for demolition, hauling, gravel base, new concrete, and finishing. Financing is available through standard home-improvement lenders for larger scopes like full driveway or pool-deck lifts — we'll point you to the ones we've seen work well for Charlotte customers. No pressure, no same-day-discount games. If we don't think lifting is the right answer for your slab, I'll say so on the assessment and won't sell you a lift that won't hold. I turn down about one in eight jobs I quote, either because it's a replacement candidate or because the underlying drainage issue has to be solved first.
Whatever's wrong under your house — standing water, wood rot, sagging floors, fallen insulation, mold — we diagnose it on the spot and hand you a fixed-price plan the same day.
If your crawlspace floods every hard rain, a vapor barrier alone won't save you.
Mold on the joists isn't a cosmetic problem — it's a moisture problem.
If your floors sag, bounce, or slope, the fix isn't a new floor — it's what's holding it up.
Full driveway replacement in Charlotte means paying for demolition, hauling, gravel base, new concrete, finishing, saw-cutting control joints, and losing the driveway for a week while it cures. Lifting the same driveway keeps the existing slab in place, supports it from below with foam, and puts you back on it the same afternoon. On a typical two-car residential driveway the lift is a small fraction of the replacement cost. Replacement only makes sense when the concrete itself is failing — spalled badly, cracked into loose pieces, or structurally damaged beyond repair. If the slab is intact and just sitting on failed soil, lifting is almost always the right call in Charlotte.
The polyurethane foam itself is essentially permanent. It's a closed-cell high-density polymer that doesn't absorb water, doesn't wash out, doesn't compact under repeated loading, and doesn't break down when exposed to soil chemistry, roots, or freeze-thaw cycles. What can cause a slab to sink again is the same thing that caused it the first time — Charlotte's Piedmont clay continuing its seasonal shrink-swell dance, or an ongoing drainage problem like a downspout dumping under the slab or an irrigation head washing fines out from below. When we do a lift we look for and flag those root causes. Address the drainage issue and the foam lift is a permanent fix for the vast majority of Charlotte driveways, patios, and pool decks we work on.
Usually yes. Most Charlotte driveways and patios we lift have cracks — hairline shrinkage cracks, control-joint cracks, sometimes one or two structural cracks. Poly foam supports the slab from below on a 12- to 18-inch grid, which means each cracked piece gets independent support and comes up together. What we can't lift is concrete that has broken into completely free-floating pieces, is spalled severely with the top surface flaking off, or has crumbled around the edges of a crack badly enough that there's nothing solid left to lift. On the free assessment I walk every crack, tap for hollow spots, and tell you honestly whether lifting will hold or whether that section needs replacement.
With polyurethane foam, 30 to 60 minutes after we finish the lift. The foam reaches roughly 90 percent of full compressive strength within 15 minutes of injection and is fully cured for vehicle loads within the hour. With traditional mudjacking the cure time is longer — 8 to 24 hours before driving on it, depending on temperature, humidity, and slurry mix. That fast return-to-service is a major reason we run poly on almost every residential driveway job in Charlotte. You leave for work in the morning on a settled driveway and come home to a level one you can pull straight onto.
Poly foam ports are 5/8 inch across and we patch every one with a color-matched concrete cap when we finish. On a fresh clean driveway you can spot them if you know where to look, but within one Charlotte season of sun, rain, and normal use they weather into the surrounding concrete and are hard to see even up close. Traditional mudjacking ports are 2 to 3 inches across and stay visible even after patching — that's one of the main reasons we recommend poly for residential driveways, sidewalks, and pool decks where appearance matters. On garage slabs and interior floors the port patches are essentially invisible under normal lighting.
For a lift on private property in Mecklenburg County you don't need a permit. We're not modifying structure or changing the footprint — we're restoring the original grade. If the work extends into the public right-of-way (usually the sidewalk between the property line and the street, or the driveway apron between the sidewalk and the street) City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County have jurisdiction, but a lift still typically doesn't trigger a permit requirement. Where you can get into permit territory is if the assessment reveals a section that needs replacement rather than lifting, and the replacement is in the right-of-way — then you're looking at a Mecklenburg County driveway approach permit. We flag that on the quote.
The generally-cited threshold is 1/4 inch of vertical displacement between panels. Anything above that is considered a trip hazard under ADA guidelines. On a private residential walk you're not going to get an ADA complaint letter, but in commercial and multi-family contexts a vertical displacement above 1/4 inch is a documented ADA violation that can trigger a complaint and remediation order. More importantly for homeowners, it's the number personal-injury attorneys point to when arguing that the owner knew or should have known about a hazardous condition. Poly lifting can bring a trip differential back to zero or grind the residual to below the threshold, whichever is more practical for the specific slab.
In most cases yes, but with cautions. A pool deck lift changes the geometry across the coping joint where the deck meets the pool wall, and if the coping and tile are already stressed from the settlement (which they usually are on any deck that's dropped more than a half inch), the lift can push them past their tolerance. We assess the coping and tile before the lift and give you a realistic read on whether they'll survive the geometry change or whether you should plan on re-caulking and possibly resetting some tile after. Sika expansion-joint caulk between the deck and coping almost always needs to be redone after a lift — that's not a defect, it's just what happens when you restore geometry across a joint that's failed.
Extremely common in Charlotte — every 1990s and 2000s subdivision built on Piedmont clay has garages doing this. The garage slab settles a half-inch to two inches at the front (exterior door) edge, pulls away from the foundation stem wall, and opens a visible gap under the garage door weather seal. We lift the slab back to grade using poly injection through 5/8-inch ports drilled through the garage floor, then patch the ports and re-caulk the wall-to-slab joint with SikaFlex or equivalent. Total downtime on a two-car garage is usually a few hours. If the pull-away is severe enough that there's a structural concern (uncommon but possible on jobs where the settlement is 3+ inches) we'll flag it for engineering review first.
Then we have to deal with the root first, or the lift is temporary. Root heave is one of the failure modes we can't fix with poly alone — poly is great at filling voids and supporting slabs from below, but it can't push back against a growing root. On a Myers Park or Dilworth walk being heaved by a mature willow-oak root, we'll typically cut the offending root back, install a root barrier (a vertical HDPE panel driven between the tree and the walk to redirect future root growth), then either drop the raised panel back to grade or lift the surrounding panels to match. Cutting a large structural root can affect tree health, so on significant trees we'll sometimes recommend consulting a certified arborist before we cut. Honest tradeoff, laid out on the assessment.
Yes. Full service area covers Mecklenburg, Union, Cabarrus, and Gaston counties in North Carolina plus York and Lancaster counties in South Carolina. That includes Matthews, Mint Hill, Pineville, Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson, Concord, Kannapolis, Harrisburg, Belmont, Gastonia, Indian Trail, Waxhaw, Weddington, Marvin, Stallings, Fort Mill, Rock Hill, and the smaller communities in between. The equipment is trailer-mounted and the poly is portable — service area is defined by drive time, not equipment logistics. Trip charges kick in on the far edges of the service area, and we'll be upfront about that when you call.
It depends on the job. For most residential Charlotte driveway and sidewalk lifts we run HMI TerraThane 24-024, a 4-pound-per-cubic-foot lifting polymer that's been the industry workhorse for over a decade. For higher-density applications like garage slabs and commercial pads we step up to HMI TerraThane 24-046 at 6 pcf. Alchemy-Spetec AP Lift 430 and AP Lift 475 are close cousins we use interchangeably when TerraThane supply is tight. For deep-injection soil stabilization we run Alchemy-Spetec AP Fill 720 or Prime Resins Prime Flex 900 LV. For pure void fill without lift we use lower-density Alchemy-Spetec AP Fill 700 or HMI TerraThane 24-006. All of these are industry-standard structural polymers — no proprietary brand-locked material we can't tell you the spec sheet for.
Most Charlotte concrete lifting jobs finish in one to three days for a typical single-family home. Larger homes or scope that includes structural repairs, drainage, or standing-water remediation can run four to seven days. Timeline goes in writing with the quote before any work starts.
Yes — we back our concrete lifting work with a written warranty in your name, transferable if you sell. Manufacturer warranties on equipment (dehumidifiers, pumps, barriers) are registered on your behalf.
Yes — general liability, workers' comp, and any trade licensing required in Mecklenburg County. Certificates on request before the job starts.
Free on-site inspection and a fixed written price before anything else. Call (980) 227-1769 or book below.