What we load · Ready Mix Concrete
Ready-mix concrete for Lubbock slabs, driveways and pours
Batched at our own plant on Erskine Street and put on the truck the mix on your ticket is the mix that shows up. You or your crew place and finish it; we make sure the load is right before it ever leaves the yard.
What the strength on your ticket actually buys you
High-strength mix costs more for a reason. A parking lot that has to carry delivery trucks and a garden path that only has to carry foot traffic are not the same order, and the strength number on the ticket is what tells the plant which one you are pouring.
Fiber mesh gets asked for a lot, and it earns its place. It holds the surface together while the mix cures and cuts down on the fine shrinkage cracking you get across a driveway or a patio. What it does not do is replace rebar. If the slab is carrying a structural load, a garage floor, a foundation, a wall, that steel still goes in. Fiber mesh is a surface fix, not a substitute for reinforcement.
Integral color is mixed into the batch at the plant, not painted on after. It is mostly a residential ask, on a driveway or a patio where the homeowner wants something other than plain grey. Tell us the color when you order, because it has to go into the mix, not onto the job later.
Base first: sub-grade and caliche under a Lubbock slab
Out here the ground under a slab is caliche, a hard, chalky, compacted layer that sits under most of the South Plains. It holds up fine on its own in a lot of places, but where it is soft, uneven or freshly disturbed, it has to be graded and compacted before a truck ever shows up with concrete.
A slab does not usually crack because the mix was weak. It cracks because the ground underneath it moved. That is why we sell the base material, sub-grade and caliche, alongside the mix instead of leaving it to whoever happens to be doing the dirt work. See what we carry for the base and order both together off the same yard.
The placing window, and what West Texas wind does to it
Ready-mix has a clock on it from the second it leaves the plant. Wind and heat here pull water out of the surface fast, sometimes faster than a crew expects, and that changes how the finish behaves while the concrete is still workable.
Timing and volume are what matter most. We batch to get the truck to you inside the window your crew needs to finish, and we would rather you order a little heavy than run short. A pour that stops halfway through to wait on a second load is a worse problem than an extra quarter yard on the ticket.
The signature move
Control joints: telling the slab where it is allowed to crack
Concrete cracks. That is not a defect, it is the material. A control joint is a saw cut that gives the crack a straight line to follow instead of leaving it to find its own way across the middle of a driveway or a slab.
- Spacing
- As a rule of thumb, joints land roughly every two to three times the slab's thickness, measured in feet. A four-inch driveway usually asks for joints somewhere around every eight to twelve feet. The exact layout for your slab is a conversation with whoever is finishing it.
- Depth
- A control joint needs to reach about a quarter of the slab's thickness to actually control anything. Cut shallower than that and the crack often skips the joint and finds its own line anyway.
- Timing
- The cut has to happen once the slab is hard enough to saw without the aggregate tearing loose, and before the concrete has had time to crack on its own. On a hot, windy day out here that window can close faster than it would somewhere calmer.
What this covers
Residential slabs
Commercial slabs
Driveways
Walkways
Parking lot paving
Curb and gutter
Walls and retaining walls
Tell us the mix and the yardage
Matt is on (806) 559-1313 and the plant line is (806) 745-1111. We are at 1521 Erskine St in Lubbock, mon-fri: 7:00 am - 5:00 pm.