Foundation installation in Santa Clara CA - built for the soil under your house

Usually you're building a new home or an addition, or your older house needs its foundation replaced. We do both, and on a replacement we work with a house mover who lifts the house first. The price mostly comes down to the size of the footprint, slab or crawl space, how much depth and steel your soil calls for, and how easily a truck can reach the spot. The schedule runs mostly on what comes before the concrete, the plans, any soil report and the permit, and after that on the city's inspections. Your written estimate spells out what's included, so you can see exactly what you're paying for.

Slab or crawl space is the big decision, and I walk you through what each one means for cost now and for reaching pipes and wiring later. A crawl space usually costs more up front. On a slab, a later plumbing, electrical or heating and cooling repair can mean breaking through concrete, which adds labor and cost. Once you've chosen and the plans are approved, we dig out and pack the subgrade, which is the ground under the concrete, and lay sand or gravel over it so water drains away. Then we set the forms and the rebar, the steel that holds the concrete together if it cracks. We keep the city's inspections in step with the work, since that's how the city checks it against the approved plans, so nothing gets buried before it's been looked at. The prep is done before the truck shows up, because concrete won't wait for anybody. If the budget gets tight, the base is the last place I'd cut, since it's hidden on day one and everything above it rests on it. After the pour we let the concrete cure, the slow hardening that gives it its strength, before anyone builds on it.

A crawl space house sits on concrete footings, the buried strips of concrete that spread the weight into the ground, and we pour those as part of the foundation or as their own job. When a small business owner is building on a commercial lot, it often makes sense to plan concrete parking lot building alongside the foundation, so the grading for both sends water away from the building.

A new foundation in Santa Clara needs a building permit, because the city requires one before you build, enlarge, alter, move, repair or demolish any building or structure. We look into the permit while we put your estimate together and check with the city office for your address, and when we're the ones pulling it, we handle the paperwork and the inspections.

The city also asks for a soil report, a study of the ground by a soil engineer, on new homes, on hillside lots and on sites with expansive or questionable soil, the kind that swells when it's wet and shrinks when it dries. Sites in earthquake fault, liquefaction or landslide zones need one too, liquefaction being ground that can go soft in a quake, and the Building Official can require a report on any other job. We build the footings and steel to what that report says. We work across Santa Clara and the cities around it, and we read soil reports the same way on foundation jobs in Sunnyvale and Milpitas.