Short, practical reads on excavation, grading, driveways, pads, footings, and concrete — written from the seat of the machine.
You can pour 4,000 PSI concrete with perfect rebar over a bad subgrade and still end up with a cracked, settled slab in five years. You can pour…
Read ›If you have ever stood on a downhill corner of a Lookout Mountain lot and looked at the uphill corner, you already understand the problem. The grade drops…
Read ›Two homeowners in East Ridge ask for quotes the same week. Same square footage on the house. Same general scope of work. One bid comes in at $9,000,…
Read ›Stumps are the part of clearing work that most homeowners underthink. The tree comes down, the brush gets chipped, the lot looks open, and then there's this knee-high…
Read ›Four homeowners on the same Ooltewah cul-de-sac can have four totally different retaining walls — and each one might be right for that lot. Material choice depends on…
Read ›"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…
Read ›"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…
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