Site Preparation
Clear, strip, shape and prep your pad — graded to plans and ready for footings and utilities.
Site preparation is everything that happens between a raw lot and a pad that's ready for footings: clearing, topsoil strip, cut and fill to the engineered grade, erosion and sediment control, and a compacted subgrade the next trade can build on.
- Home builders starting a new foundation
- Developers opening a multi-lot site
- Commercial owners adding a building, pad or lot expansion
- Farm and equestrian owners building barns, arenas or storage pads
- Single residential pads of a quarter acre up to multi-acre commercial sites
- Topsoil strip, stockpile and later re-spread
- Balanced cut and fill, or import/export when the site doesn't balance
- E&S controls: silt fence, construction entrance, inlet protection
- Building pad shaped to plan and proof-rolled
- Step 01
Site walk
We walk the property with you, look at access, slope, trees, soils and where water goes today.
- Step 02
Plan review & quote
We read the grading plan or sketch the work with you, then send a written number with the scope spelled out.
- Step 03
Locates & controls
PA One Call is placed, E&S controls and the construction entrance go in before the first bucket of dirt moves.
- Step 04
Clear & strip
Vegetation removed, topsoil stripped and stockpiled on site where it can be reused.
- Step 05
Cut to grade
Earth moved and shaped to the engineered elevations, with GPS or laser control on larger jobs.
- Step 06
Proof & hand off
Pad proof-rolled, elevations checked, site left clean and staked for the foundation crew.
Most residential pads take 2–5 working days once we mobilize. Multi-acre commercial sites run 2–6 weeks. Weather is the biggest variable — saturated clay cannot be compacted, so a wet week pushes the schedule. We normally start residential work within 2–3 weeks of a signed quote.
Grading, earth-disturbance and E&S permits are usually the owner's or engineer's responsibility, but we coordinate closely and can pull township road-opening and driveway permits when it's part of our scope. Disturbance over one acre triggers a PA DEP NPDES permit — that's handled by your design engineer before we start.
- Room for a tri-axle or lowboy to reach the work area
- A staging spot for topsoil and fill stockpiles
- Utilities marked before we mobilize (we place the One Call)
- Fencing, sheds or plantings you want kept should be flagged ahead of time
- We do not perform geotechnical design or stamp engineered grading plans
- Rock that requires blasting is subcontracted to a licensed blaster
- Compaction testing is done by a third-party testing lab when the plan requires it
- Frozen or saturated ground can make proper compaction impossible — we'll tell you rather than bury the problem
We don't publish flat prices for this work because no two sites are the same, and a number pulled out of the air helps nobody. These are the factors that move a site preparation quote up or down:
- Total volume of material moved and whether the site balances
- Haul-off or import of fill — trucking is often the biggest line
- Distance to the work and site access
- Rock, wet conditions or unsuitable soils
- Extent of E&S controls required by the permit
- Tree and stump removal quantities
Do you handle the topsoil, or does it get hauled away?
We strip and stockpile it on site whenever there's room, then re-spread it during final grade. Hauling good topsoil away and buying it back later is money wasted.
Can you work from my builder's grading plan?
Yes. Send the plan as a PDF or CAD file and we'll quote directly from it, including cut/fill quantities.
What happens if you hit rock or bad soil?
We stop, show you what we found, and price the additional work before proceeding. You'll never get a surprise invoice for it.
Site Preparation across the Lehigh Valley and surrounding townships: