Land, then a house. Between the two there’s a sequence of dirt work, and doing it in the wrong order costs more than doing it badly. Here is how a raw parcel becomes buildable ground, and what to have in hand before you call anybody.
Reorder them and you’ll pay to redo at least one.
A current survey with the corners physically marked. Everything downstream is guesswork without it, and guesswork on a boundary is the expensive kind.
Grubbing where the structure and drive are going, mulching for the rest if you want the land open. Roots and organic matter come out of anything that will be built on.
Shape the ground so water leaves the building site and goes somewhere that makes sense. This is the step that gets skipped and the one that causes the most damage.
Fill placed in lifts and compacted, raised above the surrounding grade, with the top set to whatever elevation your builder specifies.
Almost every expensive mistake we see is a sequencing mistake rather than a workmanship one.
Clearing before the survey. The most common one. Somebody clears what they believe is their lot and finds out afterwards that the line runs thirty feet the other way. Corners cost very little to have marked and there’s no version of this project where you don’t eventually need them.
Grading before clearing. You can’t shape ground you can’t see, and you certainly can’t shape ground full of root balls. Grade comes after the material is out.
Pad before drainage. A pad is a raised, compacted platform. If the water around it has nowhere to go, you have built an island in a puddle and the driveway, the yard and eventually the pad edge will tell you so. Where the water goes is decided at the grading stage.
Driveway first, because you need access. Understandable, and usually wrong. Heavy equipment and loaded fill trucks will be running that route for weeks. Put a rough access in, build the finished drive at the end.
Everything at once, to save a trip. Tempting, and occasionally right on a small lot. On anything with a slope or a wet corner, seeing the cleared ground before committing to a grade is worth more than the second trip costs.
Central Florida sand behaves in ways that surprise people who have built elsewhere.
Scrub and sandhill sand drains almost vertically. Water disappears straight down and the surface is workable within hours of a storm. Flatwoods is a different animal. There’s often a hardpan layer below the surface that stops water moving down, so the wet season leaves it soft and the same lot that’s fine in March is unworkable in August.
Two parcels a mile apart can behave completely differently. It’s one of the reasons we ask where water stands after heavy rain rather than trusting the general area.
Roughly June through September, and it changes what’s possible. High ground works nearly any month. Low ground and anything near a floodplain is dry-season work. If your schedule is tight, the time to have that conversation is before you buy, not in July.
Under whatever is growing there’s a layer of roots, leaf litter and partly decomposed organic material. It’s soft, it holds water, and it keeps breaking down after you build on it. Which means it keeps settling. It has to be stripped off the building footprint before any fill goes down.
That’s what separates grubbing from mulching, and it’s why a mulched lot isn’t a buildable one. Old agricultural ground can be worse than raw land here, not better: decades of cultivation can leave a deeper organic layer than the woods next door.
Fill is placed in layers of six to twelve inches and compacted between each one. Dumping three feet of sand and rolling the top of it produces a pad that looks right and is not. If your builder or engineer has specified density testing, that’s a good sign, and we work to it.
A building pad is a small piece of engineering, not a pile of dirt.
| Element | What it means | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Stripping | Organic material removed from the footprint and a margin beyond it | Anything organic left under the pad keeps decomposing, and decomposition means settlement under your foundation. |
| Fill | Clean structural fill. Sand with no organics or debris in it | The material is as important as the compaction. Ask where fill is coming from; it’s also one of the main ways invasive plants travel. |
| Lifts | Placed in layers of roughly six to twelve inches, compacted between each | Compaction only reaches so far. A thick lift is dense on top and loose underneath, and that’s invisible until it’s not. |
| Elevation | Top of pad set to the height your builder or engineer specifies | This number doesn’t come from us. Get it from whoever is designing the structure and hand it to us in writing. |
| Overbuild | Pad extended beyond the slab footprint on all sides | The edge of a compacted pad is its weakest part. Building the pad larger than the structure keeps that edge away from the foundation. |
| Slope away | Finished surface falling away from the building in every direction | Free to do while the machine is there, and the single cheapest piece of water protection you’ll ever buy. |
One phone call, no cost, and it’s a legal requirement for anyone putting a machine in the ground in Florida.
Call 811. Sunshine 811 in Florida. Before any excavation. It’s free, it’s required by state law, and it brings the utility owners out to mark what’s buried on the property. Power, gas, water, communications. Two full business days notice is the standard, so it’s worth starting early rather than the afternoon before.
We handle the locate for our own work, but if you’re lining up several trades it’s worth knowing the marks have a limited life and may need refreshing. On a raw parcel there’s often nothing to find at all. Which is exactly the answer you want in writing before a bucket goes in.
The other thing worth doing early is finding out what your property actually is on paper. The county property appraiser will give you the parcel number, the acreage and the existing classification, and it takes about two minutes. Bring that number to every conversation you have about the site and everyone’s life gets easier.
We move dirt. These belong to other people and we’ll happily work around them:
In rough order of size on a typical Central Florida homesite.
The two line items that surprise people are debris and fill. Debris, because material pulled out of the ground has to go somewhere and disposal is often a larger number than the cutting that produced it. Fill, because pad material is sold by the yard and hauled by the truckload, and a pad that sounds modest on paper can be several hundred cubic yards.
A worked example: a twenty-four by forty foot pad raised one foot is about thirty-six cubic yards in pure geometry. In practice you order closer to forty-five, because you overbuild past the slab edge, you lose material to compaction, and nobody wants to be short by four yards with a machine sitting idle.
What’s cheap is doing things while the machine is already there. Sloping the ground away from the pad, cutting a swale to a low corner, roughing in the drive route. All of it costs very little inside an existing trip and a great deal as a return trip. When we quote, ask what else is nearly free while we’re on site.
Rates for clearing and mulching are published on our pricing page. Grading, pads, excavation and drives are quoted per job, because the honest range on them is too wide for a number on a page to mean anything.
On a typical residential parcel, clearing is one to three days, grading is a day or two, and a pad is a day or two more, plus fill delivery. Call it a week of actual work spread over two or three weeks of scheduling. Weather in the wet season is the main variable.
For a quote, no. Photos and an approximate acreage are enough. Before we run a machine on a boundary, yes, and we’ll ask for it. We’re not going to guess at where your line is, and you shouldn’t want a contractor who would.
That comes from your builder or engineer, not from us. They will give you a number, and we build to it. If nobody has given you one yet, that’s the next call to make. It drives the fill quantity and therefore a good part of the budget.
Clearing, grubbing, grading, pads, drives, excavation and retaining walls are all ours, and doing them under one outfit means one trip and nobody blaming anybody else for the grade. What we don’t do is anything a building department issues, wells, connections to public utilities, engineering, or surveying.
Often, and on flat sand it’s more often a shaping problem than a pipe problem. Most standing water is a low spot with no route to anywhere lower, and cutting that route solves it. We work within your property lines and we don’t connect into public storm systems.
Grub the footprint, mulch the rest if you want it open. That’s the cheaper answer and usually the better one. You keep the tree cover you actually wanted, and you’re not paying clearing rates on acreage that’s only going to grow back. There’s more on that in our comparison of the two.
Dry season, roughly October through May, if you have the choice. The ground is firmer, the schedule is more reliable and compaction is easier to control. High sandy ground works nearly any month. Low flatwoods and anything near a floodplain really is dry-season work.
How we build them, what fill costs and what your builder needs to tell us.
See pads →The serviceShaping the ground so water leaves the building site.
See grading →CompareWhich one the footprint needs, and which one the rest of the parcel needs.
Read it →Send photos and a rough acreage. You’ll get a real number back, usually within a day.
Request a quoteMost quotes come back the same day. No deposit, and the price we agree on is the price you pay.