Seasonal

Spring Is When You Find Out

Nothing about your concrete fails in April. April is just when the snow goes and you can finally see what happened in February. What to walk round and look at, and what each thing means.

Updated October 2026 · Oak Creek Concrete

Our phone patterns are seasonal and entirely predictable. Almost nobody rings about a driveway in January, and a great many people ring in the first warm fortnight of spring having just walked out to a surface that looks considerably worse than they remember. The concrete did not deteriorate overnight. It has been covered up for months.

What winter actually did

Two processes, running all season, neither of them visible while it happens.

At the surface, water sits in the top layer, freezes, expands and pushes. On a well-made slab with entrained air there are microscopic voids for that expansion to go into. Where those are absent or the surface has already opened up, each cycle takes a little material with it.

Underneath, the same thing happens on a larger scale. Water in the base freezes and lifts the slab fractionally, then thaws and lets it down, and every cycle loosens the material and moves fine particles out from under the edges. That is the process that produces settlement, and it is why a driveway that was fine in November can be sitting differently in March.

Snow cover hides both until it goes. Which makes the first clear week of spring the single most informative moment of the year for looking at concrete.

The walk round, in order

Take a straight edge. A length of timber or a spirit level. This is the only tool the whole exercise needs and it answers the most important question.

Start at the joints and cracks. Lay the edge across each one. If both sides sit level, the concrete has moved and the ground has not, which is ordinary. If one side is lower, or the two rock when you stand on them, the base moved. Those are different problems with different answers and they look almost identical from standing height.

Then look at where the water went. Better still, look during rain. Standing water, a worn channel alongside an edge, a strip of ground beside the slab that never dries. All of those are telling you where next winter's damage will happen.

Walk the edges and the corners. These fail first, because they are exposed on more than one side and take the salt brought in on tyres. Crumbling here is usually surface loss rather than structural, and it matters because an open edge lets water into the base.

Look at the apron last. The section nearest the street takes road salt directly and gets crossed by the heaviest vehicles that ever come onto your property. It failing while the rest of the driveway is fine is normal rather than alarming, and in Oak Creek it is also the part that sits inside the permitted approach, which changes who specifies the repair.

Sorting what you find

Leave it. Fine lines along joints with both sides level. Light surface texture change. A little edge roughness. None of that is doing harm this year.

Watch it. A crack that is new but level, or an area that looks like it is beginning to open up. Photograph it with something for scale, and look again after next winter. A year of evidence is worth more than a guess in April.

Deal with it. Anything that has changed height. Anything somebody could catch a foot on. And anything that is now letting water straight into the base, because that is the one category that reliably gets more expensive if left.

Photograph it, which sounds trivial and is not

The single most useful habit for anybody who owns concrete: take pictures in the first clear week of spring, every year, from roughly the same positions, with something ordinary in shot for scale.

The reason is that concrete changes at a pace human memory handles badly. Nobody can recall accurately whether a crack is wider than it was eleven months ago, and the honest answer to whether something is getting worse is the single most valuable input to any repair decision.

Two springs of photographs turn an argument about opinions into a comparison of images. It also gives whoever quotes the work something far better than your recollection to reason from, and it costs you about four minutes a year.

The timing problem

Here is the practical difficulty with a spring inspection: everybody has one at the same time. Concrete calendars fill over the winter, and the work being poured in May was largely agreed in January.

So if the walk round turns up something in the third category, the useful move is to get it looked at quickly, not because the concrete is about to deteriorate further in a fortnight but because the date you can get is receding while you think about it.

And the genuinely cheap advice, which is worth more than anything else on this page: the best time to reduce what spring reveals is the previous autumn. Clear whatever drains. Work out where meltwater will run. Keep the snow pile off the one spot that always stays wet. Most of what winter does to a slab is done by water somebody allowed to sit somewhere.

Found something you would like a second view on? Concrete repair begins with a free visit and a diagnosis in writing. If two contractors have already given you conflicting readings of it, one says repair, one says replace is about interrogating that, while repair or replace a concrete driveway covers where the line between the two actually falls.