Rough and finish grading to move water away from structures, take the humps and hollows out of a yard, and leave ground the next trade can actually work on. Quoted per job.
On flat sandy ground, nearly every drainage problem is a shape problem. Fix the shape and most of them go away without a single pipe.
Central Florida is flat, sandy and gets a lot of rain in a short season. That combination means water doesn’t run off a property so much as sit on it and wait. Standing water in a yard is almost never a mystery. It’s a low spot with nowhere to drain to, or a slope running the wrong way.
Grading fixes that with shape: fall away from structures, swales to collect and carry water to somewhere it can leave, and low spots filled so nothing ponds. Done properly it’s invisible. Nobody looks at a well-graded yard and notices anything, which is exactly the point.
Rough grade gets the ground to about the right shape and elevation. The stage a builder needs before foundations, and where most site prep stops. Finish grade is the fine pass that takes out the tracks, smooths the surface and leaves it ready for sod, seed or paving.
The scope boundary worth stating plainly: we work on your property. Shaping ground, cutting swales and correcting fall are all fair game. Tying into a street drain, a public storm system or a sewer main isn’t something we take on.
Four steps, and the useful photos are the ones taken while it’s still wet.
Rules of thumb we work to:
Five Central Florida counties out of Titusville, and the drainage picture is different between them.
You can’t shape ground that still has root mass and stumps in it.
See land clearing →The precise versionWhere water needs a trench, a pipe run or a dug structure rather than a shaped surface.
See excavation →Holding a slopeWhere the grade change is too steep to shape and has to be held instead.
See retaining walls →Usually, and the first question is where the water can go once it moves. If there’s a lower point on your property, a ditch line, or an area that drains, we can normally shape a route to it. If your whole lot is the low point in the neighborhood, we’ll tell you that honestly rather than take money to push water in a circle.
Rough grade gets the ground to about the right shape and elevation. What a builder needs before foundations go in. Finish grade is the fine pass that takes out the machine tracks and leaves a surface ready for sod, seed or paving. Most site prep only needs rough.
When there’s nowhere on site to take material from, yes. Cut and fill within your own property is much cheaper, so the first thing we look at is whether the high spots and low spots can solve each other.
Anywhere we work, yes. Grading means moving the surface. What we can do is confine the work to the area that actually needs it and keep machine traffic off the rest. If the finished area is going back to sod, plan for that as part of the job.
No. We work on private property. Anything that connects into a public storm system or a sewer main is a different trade under state licensing and it’s not work we take on. If that’s what your situation needs, we’ll say so early rather than halfway through.
Most residential yards are one to three days depending on size, how much material has to move and whether fill is being imported. A rough grade on a cleared build site is usually quicker than correcting drainage around an existing house.
Most quotes come back the same day. No deposit on mulching or site work, and the price we agree on is the price you pay.
