Concrete steps in Fonthill
Concrete steps usually fail through frost heave, and frost heave needs water in the ground to do its work. Fonthill largely denies it that.
The Kame is sand and gravel, so water drains down rather than sitting in the soil around a footing and expanding when it freezes. The practical consequence is that step assemblies here often outlast the same construction twenty minutes north in clay, and the dramatic version of the problem, steps lifting and separating from the house with a widening gap at the top riser, is less common.
What replaces it is settlement. When granular fill is placed around a foundation and never properly compacted, it consolidates under load over a period of years. A landing sitting on that fill goes down with it, unevenly, and the result looks different from heave but produces the same outcome: a landing with a slope on it, a joint against the house that has opened, and water getting into places it should not.
The remedy is identical in both cases, which is to deal with what is under the steps rather than with what shows. Resurfacing an assembly that is still moving buys a season or two before the topping cracks in exactly the same places. Rebuilding means removing what is there, compacting or replacing the fill, and pouring onto something that has stopped moving. Two quotes for this work can differ substantially and look identical for the first two years, which is why the cheaper one keeps winning.
The Code requirements are the same everywhere and worth stating. Riser and tread consistency is mandatory, because people climb steps by rhythm rather than by looking at each tread. Where the steps or landing sit above the height the Building Code sets, a guard is required, and on the ridge slopes with an elevated entrance that comes up regularly.
Where a walkway or driveway is already being poured, folding the steps into the same visit costs less and produces cleaner transitions, since the seam between the two gets formed as one detail.
One thing the Kame does not change is footing depth. Well-drained ground reduces how much frost heave a footing has to resist, but it is not a substitute for getting below the frost line, and a set of steps founded shallow on the reasoning that the sand drains anyway is a set that moves. The depth requirement is the depth requirement. What the drainage genuinely buys is a longer working life out of a correctly built assembly, not permission to build a cheaper one, and it is worth asking any quote where the footings are going and how deep, because that is the part of the job that disappears the moment the forms come off.
We also pour the walkways they connect to and the driveways they meet, and cover the rest of our Fonthill service area.
East along the bench heave is very much alive and most sets are replacements, covered on concrete steps in Grimsby. North the clay makes it the dominant failure again, dealt with on concrete steps in St. Catharines.
