We attempted to engage AC and luckily ‘Dodged-A-Bullet’
We attempted to engage this company to construct our new driveway but when we specified a few details on how we wanted it to be done this caused Advanced Concrete to query us on why we had these specifications and “in my 40 years of doing concrete I’ve never come across this excessive procedure” and when we explained why we had these simple requirements we were then told “I’m not interested”.
So what was the issue with our “excessive”
requirements??
We wanted 40 Mpa concrete because as a minimum polished concrete should have a compressive strength of at least 35 Mpa and we also wanted a thicker 150mm concrete and a higher grade mesh because as our landscaping wasn’t finished the driveway would have trucks on it in the future and therefore it needed to be able to handle higher than normal (car) vehicle loads.
None of this is actually “excessive” at all and polished concrete should as stated be a minimum of 35 Mpa and using higher grade mesh and increased concrete thickness is used quite commonly in commercial applications and any areas subject to higher than standard vehicle traffic but AC didn’t like the fact that we knew a little about how the work should be done and then suddenly didn’t want to do work for us.
In the most simple terms none of this made the work any harder but it showed this contractor that they were ‘expected’ to do it properly and that they wouldn’t be able to simply deliver a substandard result.
Be very wary of contractors that claim to ‘know’ how things should be done but don’t know the basic facts.
We think we are lucky this contractor wasn’t desperate for work otherwise we possibly would have received a quality of workmanship that was very substandard and then extremely hard to remedy.