Concrete Removal in Seattle, WA

Concrete removal is breaking out and hauling away flatwork and small structures: driveways, patios, walks, garage and shed slabs, stairs, footings and block walls. In Seattle the reasons vary. A driveway has cracked and settled on a sloped lot, a patio is being replaced with pavers or planting, a slab is in the way of an addition or an accessory dwelling unit, or a set of front steps up from the sidewalk has heaved and become unsafe. The job is the same each time: cut, break, load, haul, and leave a base the next crew can work on.

What changes the price

Fixr's concrete removal guide puts the national average at about $4 a square foot, with unreinforced concrete at $2 to $4 and reinforced concrete at $4 to $6. Rebar or wire mesh takes longer to break and separate. Thickness matters, so does access: a patio behind a house on a steep Seattle lot may have to come out by hand-loaded wheelbarrow or a small track loader instead of a larger machine. Disposal is the other piece. Clean concrete with no dirt or trash mixed in can go to a recycler that crushes it into aggregate, which usually costs less than mixed debris.

How we break it out

• Saw cut the edges. Where a slab meets concrete that stays, such as a garage floor or a city sidewalk, we saw cut a clean line so the break stops where it should.
• Break in sections. Jackhammers, a skid steer breaker or a mini excavator, depending on thickness and access.
• Separate the steel. Rebar and mesh are pulled out and sent to metal recycling.
• Load and haul. Concrete is kept clean of soil so it can be recycled.
• Grade the base. The area is left graded and ready for gravel, soil or new forms.

The public part of the driveway

Where a Seattle driveway reaches the street, the curb cut and the sidewalk across it are in the public right-of-way, which is the Seattle Department of Transportation's territory, not SDCI's. SDCI's next-steps sheet lists SDOT at (206) 684-5253 among the agencies to coordinate with. If your project touches the sidewalk or curb, we flag it at the estimate so the right permit is part of the plan.

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Slabs, footings and walls

Removing a garage or shed slab is often the last piece of an outbuilding removal. Old footings from a long-gone porch or a buried slab found during a remodel are common in Seattle's older neighborhoods. Retaining walls are different: a wall holding back a slope is doing structural work, and taking it out without a plan for the soil behind it can cause a slide. On steep or slide-prone sites SDCI may require a geotechnical report, and we only remove a retaining wall as part of a plan that replaces what it was doing.

Before we dig

Breaking out a slab rarely goes deep, but removing footings and stairs does. Seattle's demolition next-steps sheet requires a call to 811 so public underground lines are marked before digging, and we also ask about private lines such as a buried power feed to a garage or a sprinkler main.