Short, practical reads on excavation, grading, driveways, pads, footings, and concrete — written from the seat of the machine.
"About a truckload" is the most common gravel order we get from homeowners — and for a 90-foot driveway it's almost always wrong. One truckload of crusher run will typically cover only about a third of what a driveway that…
Read the post →"I want a pond about like the one my granddaddy had" is a sentence we hear a lot. Sometimes that pond was a half-acre fishing hole with a…
Read ›Three inches of rain in two hours is enough to peel the top course off a gravel driveway and dump it in the road. We see it constantly…
Read ›Walk a 20-year-old neighborhood after a hard summer rain and you can pick out which houses had drainage designed into the pad and which didn't. The ones that…
Read ›A common scenario on slab pours in the Greater Chattanooga area: the grading sub has finished, but spot checks across the pad show variation of an inch or…
Read ›Most people pick a shelter spot the same way they pick a spot for a propane tank: somewhere out of the way, somewhere they won't trip over it.…
Read ›Two houses go up on the same street in Ooltewah. One sits on a flat parcel and gets a full basement — four walls underground, windows that look…
Read ›Most detached garages we see come down for one of three reasons: the slab has heaved past the point of leveling, the framing is rotting from a roof…
Read ›Two houses on the same street can have completely different foundation systems underneath — and the dirt work that supports them looks nothing alike. A slab-on-grade home in…
Read ›There is a myth that frost lines do not matter in the South. We hear it on every other estimate. Then we get the call in February from…
Read ›The call usually comes a year after the project finishes: water is pooling against the foundation, the yard turns into a swamp every storm, the new driveway is…
Read ›"I just need a couple trees gone." That's how the call usually starts. Half the time, that's exactly the right scope. The other half, the homeowner is actually…
Read ›A familiar pattern on sloped lots in Hixson: mulch washes down the front slope into the driveway after every thunderstorm. Homeowners try timbers, then river rock, then a…
Read ›