Concreters in Norwood for villa driveways, courtyards, laneways and extension slabs

Norwood, in short

Norwood is three kilometres east of the city, laid out in the 1840s and, with Kensington, the first municipality outside Adelaide. The Parade is its spine, a kilometre and a half of shops, cafes and restaurants running from Fullarton Road to Portrush Road, with the Norwood Town Hall and the Concert Hall in the middle and Norwood Oval, home of the Redlegs, just north of it. Magill Road and Kensington Road mark the edges; Kent Town, Stepney and Maylands sit to the north and west, Kensington and Marryatville to the east, and Rose Park to the south.

It is one of Adelaide's most walkable and most protected suburbs, with heritage and character overlays across most of its residential streets. We come in along Magill Road or The Parade most weeks.

The houses, and what they need

Norwood's houses are the reason people move here: 1870s and 80s bluestone villas with iron lacework, symmetrical cottages and row cottages on narrow blocks, 1920s bungalows toward Kensington, and the townhouses and apartments that have filled in around Kent Town and The Parade. A lot of the older blocks have a rear lane, and a lot of driveways are a single strip down one side that the house has outgrown, if there is a driveway at all.

So the Norwood job list is villa driveways widened to the fence line where the frontage allows; carport and garage aprons off the rear lanes; side paths between the house and the fence; rear courtyards and alfrescos as the villas are opened up at the back; and the slabs for the extensions, studios and plunge pools going in behind them.

The ground under Norwood

Norwood sits on the Adelaide plains clay, the reactive ground under most of the inner suburbs: it swells through a wet winter and shrinks through a dry summer, and the cracks in a century of villa footings show what it does to anything poured without allowance for it. Every Norwood slab we pour gets a compacted rubble base, mesh sitting mid-slab on chairs, and saw-cut joints at tight centres so the movement shows up as a straight line rather than a crack. Extension slabs are engineered to the block's soil class and inspected before the pour, and where a slab meets old footings we put a proper joint between them.

Access is the other Norwood question. Narrow blocks, rear lanes and street trees mean the concrete truck often can't get near the pour, so we bring a pump or barrow it, and we plan that at the quote rather than on the day.

The council, and getting to you

Norwood is in the City of Norwood Payneham & St Peters, a council that looks after a lot of heritage. The strip between your boundary and the road is theirs, so a new or widened crossover needs a permit, has to be poured to their specification, and is inspected; in the heritage and character areas there are also rules about frontages, fences and the plane trees. We prepare and lodge the application, pour to the spec and book the inspection, all inside the quote, and we'll tell you at the measure if an overlay changes what's possible.

We're in the inner east most weeks, so a measure and quote in Norwood 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.