Qualified
Anyone can pour concrete. Knowing why it lasts is the trade.
Nick holds a Certificate III in Concreting. Here’s what that actually means when it’s your driveway, and why the bits you can’t see are the bits you’re paying for.
The trade
A concreter is half a dozen trades in one.
People see a square of steel and a truck full of wet concrete and reckon that’s the job. The pour is the easy part. The trade is everything that happens before the truck turns up, and the twenty minutes after it leaves.
Run a drain through a slab and you need to understand plumbing to get the falls and the penetrations right. Pour a footing and you’re reading a soil report, because soft clay and rock don’t want the same thing. Set out a house slab and you’re reading an engineer’s plan, working out why the steel is specified where it is instead of tying it where it looks about right.
Get any of those wrong and it doesn’t show up on the day. It shows up in a year.
Half a plumber
Drains, penetrations and falls all get set before the pour. Once concrete has gone off, it has gone off. Get a drain wrong and the fix is cutting up a finished slab.
Half a geologist
Footings get sized off the soil, not off a guess. Reactive clay moves. Sand won't hold. You read the soil report and pour for what is actually under the block, not what was under the last one.
Half a draftsman
An engineer specifies steel where it is for a reason. Knowing the reason is what tells you which bits matter and which bits don't when the site throws you a surprise.
All of a finisher
Placing, floating, trowelling and curing are four different skills with four different timings. Miss the window on any one of them and the surface wears it.
The qualification
Certificate III in Concreting. Start to finish.
CPC30320 is the nationally recognised trade qualification for concreting in Australia. It covers plan reading, formwork, reinforcement, placement, finishing and curing. It is the difference between being taught the trade properly and picking it up on the tools when the chance comes along.
Nick did the lot. Taught from scratch, the way it’s meant to be done, and finished it.
Plenty of good concrete gets poured by people who never did the qualification, and we’ve got no argument with any of them. But concrete does go sideways sometimes, and when it does, being taught the theory is what tells you why, and what to do about it. That’s the part you’re actually hiring.
The process
Concrete is a sequence. Skip a step and it turns up later.
Place
The concrete goes in and gets spread to level. Straightforward, and the only part of the job most people ever stand and watch.
Bull float
The float knocks the surface down and brings the paste up. This is what closes the top of the slab. Skip it and you have left the surface open, which you won't notice on the day.
Steel trowel
The machine works the top layer and seals it, and it levels and flattens as it goes. One quick pass over wet concrete is not the same job. You can see it in the surface, and in a hot climate you'll see it again when the top opens up.
Finish and cure
Non-slip, exposed, coloured, whatever the job calls for. Timing is everything here. Go too early on a non-slip finish and you don't get grip, you get a trip hazard.
None of that is exotic. It’s the order, and the patience to wait for each window instead of packing up early. We’ve been on jobs where we poured first thing and were still running the trowel machine at lunch, while the crew who started two hours after us had already stripped their boards and gone. Concrete tells on you eventually.
Straight answer
Your concrete will crack. That’s not the question.
Concrete cracks. It’s a rigid material that shrinks as it cures and moves with the ground underneath it. Anyone promising you a slab that never cracks is telling you something that isn’t true.
The job isn’t to stop it. The job is to decide where it happens. A higher strength mix for the loads the slab will actually see. Steel through it so the two sides of a crack stay held together and it never opens up. Joints cut where a crack wants to go anyway, so it goes there instead of across the middle of your driveway.
Pour 15 MPa with no steel in it and walk across it in a year’s time, you’ll find the cracks. Pour it properly and you’ll struggle to find them at all. Same material. That’s the whole difference.
If it goes wrong
We answer the phone.
We carry public liability insurance and we back our work with a workmanship warranty. But the certificate on the wall isn’t really the point. The point is what happens on the day something doesn’t go to plan.
Concrete is outdoor work and it’s weather-dependent. Sometimes it rains on a pour. Sometimes a load turns up wrong. The question worth asking is whether the bloke who poured it picks up when you ring, and whether he’s got another option in his back pocket. There’s usually a way to save a bad surface without ripping up six or seven grand of concrete, but you have to know it exists.
We get called out to price fixes on jobs that were never ours, where the original concreter simply stopped answering. That risk never shows up on a quote. If we get something wrong, we come back and sort it out. You’ll have Nick’s number the whole way through, and he’s the one who answers it.
The bigger picture
The cheapest quote can cost you more.
A quote is for concrete. The bill is for your whole yard.
We’ve seen an excavator walked across a lawn in the middle of winter to save a couple of hundred on access. The concrete came in cheap. The landscaper who had to put the yard back afterwards was a couple of grand. Nobody put that on the quote.
Colour is the same story. A client asked us once how a finish would sit with their colour scheme, and finished with “you’re the pro, what do you reckon?” The honest answer was another question: what’s the landscaping doing? We can pour just about any colour you like. Knowing which one you’ll still be happy with in five years means looking at more than the slab.
So we plan the access, protect what’s around the pour, and think about the finished thing rather than the square metres. We’re not the cheapest quote you’ll get. We’re not trying to be.
Fair questions
The things people ask us.
- Does a concreter have to be qualified?
- Certificate III in Concreting (CPC30320) is the nationally recognised trade qualification for concreting in Australia. Licensing requirements differ from state to state and are changing, so a lot of concreting gets done by people who don't hold it. Nick holds it either way. If you're comparing quotes, it's a fair question to ask anyone you're considering.
- What does a Certificate III in Concreting actually cover?
- Reading construction plans, formwork, steel reinforcement, concrete placement, finishing and curing, across residential and commercial work. It is a full trade qualification taught from scratch, not a short course or a weekend ticket.
- Why is your quote higher than the other one I got?
- Usually it comes down to prep, access and finish. We price the base, the steel and the protection of everything around the pour, because those decide whether the slab lasts and whether your yard survives the job. We sit medium to high on price. The value turns up later.
- Will my concrete crack?
- Almost certainly, somewhere, eventually. Concrete shrinks as it cures and it moves with the ground under it. The job isn't to stop cracking, it's to control it: the right strength mix for the loads, steel through the slab to hold it together, and joints cut where a crack wants to go anyway so it goes there instead of across the middle of your driveway.
- Are you insured?
- Yes, we carry public liability insurance. More to the point, we come back if something isn't right. A workmanship warranty applies to every pour, and you'll have Nick's number the whole way through.
Got a job in mind?