Excavation and earthwork

Excavation is the part of a job where mistakes are expensive later and invisible at the time. Over-dig a footing and you are paying for the fill that goes back in. Miss compaction and the slab cracks a year after everyone has left.

We dig to the grades on the plan and we compact what we backfill. On sloping lots we balance cut and fill on site where the ground allows it, because moving dirt off a site and buying it back is the most avoidable cost in earthwork.

Around Puget Sound the ground changes over short distances — glacial till that takes a clean vertical face in one block, soft valley fill that will not hold one in the next. We would rather look at the site before quoting than price it off a drawing and re-price it later.