Fontana Concrete Pro reaches Chino Hills from our Sierra Avenue yard in Fontana, 18 miles away by the 60 and the 71. Every pad in this town was graded out of a hill, so we build the base for that.
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A crack that runs dead straight across a Chino Hills driveway is rarely a fault in the concrete. It is the seam where graded cut meets engineered fill underneath it.
These tracts were made by grading hills flat. A pad is cut into the slope uphill and the spoil is compacted as engineered fill downhill. The house is designed for that. The flatwork beside it usually was not. Cut ground barely moves, fill goes on consolidating for years, and the clay in these hills swells and shrinks with every wet season across both. A slab over the join is held at one end and dropped at the other. Your own address is mapped on the USDA Web Soil Survey.
Our own town gives the opposite trouble, which is how we learned to read this one. Fontana sits on Lytle Creek cobble that drains fast and stands up in a trench. Chino Hills gives you clay that shrinks off a footing in September and pushes back in February, on a slope moving downhill throughout. It is why work here often starts with a retaining wall rather than the slab the owner rang about. We hold a CSLB C-8 license and carry liability insurance on every job.
Chino Hills has been a city since 1991 and its tracts were graded onto the hills from the 1980s on. The flatwork here is not worn out. It is spanning a cut-and-fill seam, and that asks for a different build.
Chino Hills driveways run downhill from a garage cut into the pad, and that fall is what breaks them. A drive on this grade wants thickened edges, joints cut across the slope rather than down it, and base compacted in lifts on both sides of the cut-and-fill line.
Back gardens here are terraced, so a patio usually lands on the filled half of the lot with a wall holding the drop below it. We stand the slab clear of the wall stem, drain it to daylight instead of into the backfill, and pour a section that spans fill still settling.
Nearly every Chino Hills tract runs a design review, and the covenants reach the color and pattern of anything the street can see. Stamped work is how most owners get texture past that: we build a sample board from the tract palette and submit it before a form goes down.
Front walks in Chino Hills step down the slope in short runs, and every riser is a place a panel can tip as the pad below it consolidates. We rebuild at full depth over compacted base, hold the risers to one height, and keep the fall running clear of the door threshold.
Garages here are cut into the high side of the pad, so the floor takes the wettest ground on the lot from behind it. A replacement goes down over a vapor barrier and steel, isolated from the stem wall, so a cut face that moves cannot drag a crack out across the floor.
Chino Hills tracts came from a handful of elevations, and owners want a walk or courtyard that reads as part of the house rather than as a repair. Integral color, exposed aggregate and saw-cut banding do that. We finish samples on your own lot, in the light they will live in.
Retaining walls are ordinary here because the lots were cut and filled to make them level. A wall doing real work needs footings carried down through the fill into competent ground, weeps and drainage behind the stem, and steel sized to the height it holds back.
Interior slabs come up in Chino Hills where a garage becomes a room or an addition reaches out over the filled half of a pad. That floor has to be flat enough for finish flooring and sealed underneath, because clay on a hillside lot stays damp long after the slope has drained.
Flatwork permits go through the Building and Safety counter at the City of Chino Hills, and we file them and meet the inspector ourselves. Grading, drainage and any wall outside the city's own exemption get a plan check here, a slower gate than a flat town sets. The second gate is the tract association: most neighborhoods approve exterior finishes first, and an approval landing after the concrete is worth nothing.
The town is ridges and canyons rather than a grid, and the streets follow them. Los Serranos around the old golf course is the oldest ground in the city and predates the master plans by decades; the ranch tracts off Peyton Drive and Butterfield Ranch Road are 1980s and 1990s pads; Carbon Canyon is narrow, steep and served by one road. What that changes for you is access. A pump truck reaches a canyon garden a mixer chute cannot, and we settle which one your street needs at the measure.
Chino Hills sits in the far corner of San Bernardino County with Orange County over the ridge and Los Angeles County at Diamond Bar, and the towns nearest it are ones we already cover, Chino four miles north, Yorba Linda five over the hill, Diamond Bar six up the 71. A homeowner here comparing notes with a relative one county away is often comparing two of our jobs, on two kinds of ground.
Four steps, and Every estimate is measured and written on site. The two that are particular to Chino Hills are the plan check on anything that touches grading and the design submittal your tract wants before a finish is poured.
We reply within 1 business day. Tell us the street, the tract and where the slab is cracking, and we book a visit, usually inside the week.
We find the cut-and-fill line, probe the clay, shoot the falls across the pad, and write the scope down before any figure is named.
We file with the City of Chino Hills and put color and finish to your association at once, so the two waits run together.
Base in lifts, steel set, pour and finish. We walk the joints and the drainage with you and close the permit out.
Send the address and what is failing. We come out, find the seam under it, and give you a figure on paper with the base depth, the joint layout and the drainage on it. The work leaves with a written workmanship guarantee against defects in how it was built.
Reviews
These reviews come from across the towns we cover rather than Chino Hills alone. We would rather show you the whole record than a selected page of it, and we can point you at the nearest finished job to your street.
“Our house south of Valley is one of the old steel-town builds and the driveway had never been replaced. They broke out 520 square feet, screened the cobble out of the base and poured 5 inches. Andre cut the joints himself before he left.”
“We are in one of the newer tracts up north and the builder patio was cracked across the middle in three years. Fontana Concrete Pro dug it out, put a proper base under it and poured 320 square feet with joints on a 10-foot grid. No cracks after two summers.”
“The slope at the back of our lot in Jurupa Hills was moving every winter and taking the fence with it. They poured a 40-foot wall on footings to 24 inches with drainage behind it. Two wet seasons on and there is not a crack in it anywhere.”
Six things homeowners here ask before they book, the hillside, the tract approval, the wait at the counter, and what a job on a graded pad actually involves.
Because the ground was rebuilt before the house went on it. Grading a hillside tract cuts the uphill half of a pad away and compacts the spoil as fill on the downhill half. Fill settles for years and cut ground does not, so anything over the two is pulled apart from below, and the clay adds a seasonal swell. The lasting repair is under the slab: strip the loose material, compact in lifts, steel across the join.
Usually both, and they are separate queues. Building and Safety at the City of Chino Hills permits new flatwork and plan-checks anything altering grading or drainage, or a wall the city's narrow exemption misses. Your association is the other approval, and in most tracts here it governs finishes the street can see, color, pattern, how far a slab may run.
Chino Hills is 18 miles from our yard on Sierra Avenue, which is the 60 west and then the 71 south, and a loaded truck makes it in about forty minutes outside the peak. We reply within 1 business day and normally book the measure inside the same week. Crews start on site at 8am rather than mid-morning, which matters more here than elsewhere because a pour on a slope wants finishing before the afternoon heat.
Sometimes, and it is better to know at the measure than halfway through. A terraced Chino Hills lot often has a slope the patio would otherwise have to hold back, and a slab is not a wall, loading its edge that way is how it ends up leaning. Where the ground behind the pad needs holding, we build the wall on footings taken through the fill, drain the back of it, and pour the flatwork afterward.
Demolition and base take one to two days, the pour is a day, and the slab is walkable in about 48 hours and takes a car at seven. The concrete is the predictable part. What moves a Chino Hills date is paperwork: a plan check on grading or a wall runs longer than a plain flatwork permit, and a tract design review can wait on a board meeting. We start both clocks the day you accept.
We cover 20 towns inside a 25-mile radius of Fontana, and Chino Hills sits near the western edge of it with Chino, Diamond Bar, Yorba Linda, Norco and Eastvale all close by. The ground changes faster than the mileage suggests, hillside clay here, dairy fill at Eastvale, river cobble at home, so we quote each town on what is under it. Ask us for the finished job nearest your own street and we will name it.
Chino Hills sits where three counties meet, so our next job is often over a ridge or a county line. These are the towns inside the same 25-mile radius, ordered by how far each one is from us.
Open the Fontana Office in Google Maps Send the address and a photograph of the crack. We will measure it on site, find the cut-and-fill line under it, and put the scope and the figure in writing before you decide. We reply within 1 business day.