Rubber Surfacing Keeps Sudbury Front Steps From Glazing With Ice
We cover steps and landings with a porous rubber surfacing that lets the film of meltwater soak through rather than freeze on top. A concrete step holds water in its pores and on its surface at dusk, the temperature falls, and by morning there is clear ice under a skiff of snow. That is the fall that breaks a wrist in the Flour Mill or the Donovan every March.
Rubber surfacing drains and stays grippy when wet, so the step is safer on a March morning at seven than bare concrete ever is. Rubber surfacing is also softer to land on and easier to shovel with a plastic-edged shovel.
Patios On Rocky Sudbury Lots Crack Where The Slab Spans Rock And Fill
We pour over patios that have cracked where the concrete sits on bedrock at one end and on frost-prone fill at the other. Hillside lots off Ramsey Lake Road, around Long Lake and through Copper Cliff are built on Canadian Shield outcrops, and a patio slab that spans the change in ground heaves unevenly every winter. The crack that results is usually static after the first few years.
Rubber surfacing bridges those hairline and static cracks and flexes with the slab through the freeze. A crack still growing wider is cut and repaired first. Then the patio rubber surfacing is poured three-eighths of an inch deep, or half an inch where the slab is rougher, in a colour chosen from the EPDM range, and the patio reads as one piece again.
Rubber Surfacing Locks Heaved Interlock Walkways Into One Sheet
We pour rubber surfacing straight over interlock and pavers, so the sunken corners and the weeds in the joints disappear under one seamless surface. Pavers in the Valley communities heave in the silty soils and settle unevenly; in the old city they tip on the rocky fill, and rubber surfacing covers both. Either way the walkway ends up with edges to trip on and gaps to weed.
Rubber surfacing locks the pavers together under a flexible sheet with no joints. It also goes over wood decks and stamped concrete, so a whole backyard of mixed surfaces can be brought to one level and one colour.
On every step, landing and patio the surface is ground or pressure washed, sealer is stripped, cracks are filled and primer goes on before the rubber surfacing is troweled. Step nosings are wrapped in rubber surfacing and edges are finished so nothing catches a boot or a shovel. The colour and binder are on the quote; a light colour on a sunny south-facing step gets an aliphatic binder so it does not amber.
Foot traffic returns to the rubber surfacing the next day. A patio that runs into a pool deck can be poured in the same visit.