Excavation & Foundation Services

The work

What this actually involves

Basement digs, footings, foundation excavation and backfill for new builds and additions across Indianapolis and Central Indiana.

Digging to a line somebody else has to build on

A foundation dig is not a hole. It is a flat, correctly sized, correctly located excavation with undisturbed bearing at the bottom and enough room outside the line for the crew to form and strip. Cut it short and the concrete crew loses a day working in a trench. Overdig it and you are paying to bring stone back in. We set the dig off the builder's stakes, keep the bottom clean, and leave the spoil where the backfill will come from rather than double-handling it across the lot.

Frost depth, bearing and the water you cannot see

Indiana's residential code puts footings a minimum of 30 inches below finished grade so they sit under the frost line. That is the floor, not the target — on a sloping lot the uphill and downhill corners are not the same depth, and the number that matters is depth below final grade, which is not always the ground you are standing on. Central Indiana subsoil is clay-heavy glacial till, so a hole dug in March can hold water for days. Where the bottom is soft we say so before the pour, not after.

Backfill is where foundations get ruined

More basements leak from bad backfill than from bad concrete. Dumping wet clay straight back against a green wall pushes it, and clay packed tight to the block holds every drop that lands on it. Backfill goes in once the wall is braced or the floor is on, in lifts rather than one drop, with drainage stone and tile at the footing doing the job they were put there to do, and the finished grade running away from the house on every side.