Concreters in Golden Grove for sloping driveways, slabs, paths and exposed aggregate

Golden Grove, in short

Golden Grove is one of Adelaide's big planned suburbs. Until the 1980s it was orchards, market gardens and a sand quarry on the north-eastern foothills; then the Golden Grove development, a joint venture between the state and Delfin, laid out the streets, the reserves and the schools in one go, and the houses went up through the late 80s and 90s. The Golden Way runs through the middle of it, with The Grove shopping centre and Golden Grove Village, the three schools sharing one campus, the Golden Grove Arts Centre, and Cobbler Creek Recreation Park along the northern edge.

It sits about twenty kilometres north-east of the city, with Tea Tree Plaza and the O-Bahn interchange down the hill at Modbury, and the ridge of the Mount Lofty Ranges behind. We come up through Modbury or across from Salisbury most weeks.

The houses, and what they need

Almost everything here is 1985 to 2005: brick veneer, tiled roofs, a double garage and a decent block, a lot of it two-storey on the steeper streets. The original driveways were poured by the volume builders of the day, thin, unreinforced and on a slope, and thirty years on they are cracking, flaking and slippery in the wet. That's the job we do most in Golden Grove: the old drive out, a proper base and mesh, a grippy finish and a strip drain at the garage door.

The other Golden Grove staples are shed and workshop slabs on the bigger blocks, pool surrounds as the pools go into the terraced backyards, and side paths with steps, because a lot of blocks fall a metre or more from the front to the back.

The ground under Golden Grove

Foothills ground is two things at once. On the cut side of a terrace it's clay over rock, firm but reactive, swelling in winter and shrinking in summer. On the fill side it's whatever was pushed there when the block was levelled, and it settles. A slab that spans the two without a compacted base and mesh mid-slab cracks along the line between them. We compact, reinforce and saw-cut for it, and on a steep block we'll cut a shed slab into the slope with a retaining wall rather than pour it on fill.

Water is the other thing. A sloping driveway sends every downpour toward the garage, and a terraced backyard sends it toward the house. Fall in the formwork, a strip drain across the garage door and a grated drain at the bottom of a path are standard on a Golden Grove job, not extras.

The council, and getting to you

Golden Grove is in the City of Tea Tree Gully. The strip between your boundary and the road is the council's, so a new or widened crossover needs a permit, has to be poured to their specification, and may be inspected. We prepare and lodge the application, pour to the spec and book the inspection, all inside the quote.

We're in the north-east most weeks, so a measure and quote in Golden Grove is usually within a few days of your call, and a job is usually booked one to three weeks out depending on the weather and the pour schedule.