The dirt
Excavation in the Yakima Valley
Foundation digs, septic tanks, land clean outs and grading, run with our own excavator and skid steer.
Chapter 01
What a bad dig costs you later
Every house starts as a hole, and the hole is where most of the quiet mistakes get made. A footing dug too deep gets filled back with loose soil. A pad left soft under a slab settles a winter or two later. Grade that runs toward the house instead of away from it sends water straight at the foundation.
None of that shows on the day the dig is finished. It shows in a cracked slab, a damp crawlspace, a door that starts to stick. The work that matters is the work nobody sees once the house is standing.
Our excavator working a lawn above the Yakima Valley
Our own machines, our own crew
We do everything from digging foundations to digging for septic tanks and land clean outs. The excavator and the skid steer are ours, so the same crew that cuts the ground stays on the job, and the dig is not waiting on a sub who is booked out for three weeks.
That is why we can start at the first scoop of dirt and keep going. Once the ground is ready, the footing forms, the framing and the roof come from the same outfit, and the schedule is not a handoff between strangers.
On the grading side, we shape the lot so water leaves the house before the walls go up, not after the first hard rain shows us where it wants to go.
Chapter 03
The sites other contractors turned down
A good part of the valley is hillside. Pads get cut into slopes above the orchards, with a view of the valley floor and very little flat ground to work from. It is slow, careful machine work, and some builders simply pass on it.
One customer wrote that their excavation and foundation were really challenging, the type that some contractors did not want to take because of the difficulty, and that the work still passed inspection without trouble. Hard ground is a normal day for us.
LF Construction: WA general contractor license LFCONCE763JD. Call (509) 859-5594.
ON THE GROUND
Machines in the dirt, houses to follow
A skid steer for moving material and trimming grade, an excavator for the deep work. Between them we open the ground for footings and septic tanks, then clear the land around it so the next crew walks onto a clean site.
Once the pad is ready, the same crew moves on to the footings and foundation. You can see how those jobs finished on our projects page.
