Dirt work is the part of a project where mistakes get expensive and invisible. A pad built half a foot low, a pond that won’t hold, a trench backfilled wrong — you find out in the first heavy rain, and by then there’s a slab sitting on it.
We do excavation across Montgomery County: house pads, barndominium and shop pads, RV pads, ponds, trenching, drainage and grading, cut and fill, driveways and culverts, demolition support and laydown yards.
Almost everything on this page comes back to one fact about this county: the soil is clay. Clay holds water, clay shrinks and swells, and clay is unforgiving of equipment run on it at the wrong time of year. A contractor who understands that builds you a pad that stays where he put it. A contractor who doesn’t leaves you a rutted site and a cracked slab three summers from now.
What we do
House pads. Cut, fill, compact and crown for drainage. This is the single most common job we run. Getting the elevation right relative to the road, the ditch and the neighboring ground is what keeps water out of a house for the next forty years, and it is decided in one afternoon with a machine.
Barndominium, barn and shop pads. Same work, usually a larger footprint and often a heavier slab. Barndo pads on raw acreage almost always need clearing first and a driveway built before a concrete truck can reach them.
RV pads. A smaller pad with the same requirements — level, compacted, crowned, and drained so a rig isn’t sitting in standing water after every storm.
Ponds. Dig, shape, key the core, pack the dam. Stock ponds, irrigation ponds, detention ponds. Montgomery County clay is generally good pond soil, which is why so many hold water here without a liner.
Trenching. Water lines, electrical, septic laterals, drainage lines, conduit.
Drainage and grading. Swales, french drains, surface grading, sheet flow correction, culvert and driveway drainage.
Cut and fill. Leveling sloped ground, building up low spots, balancing a site so material doesn’t have to be trucked in or out.
Driveways and culverts. Culvert set and backfilled, base material placed, crowned and compacted.
Demolition support. Slab removal, foundation removal, backfill after a structure comes out. See demolition.
Laydown and equipment yards. Commercial pads, equipment yards, parking and staging areas.
Matching the machine to the job
Most of what makes an excavation quote reasonable or unreasonable is whether the right machine shows up. This is a rough guide to what each one is for.
| Machine | Best at | Wrong for |
|---|---|---|
| Skid steer / compact track loader | Tight-access yards, small pads, finish grading, spreading base | Bulk cut and fill, deep digging, anything at volume |
| Mini excavator | Trenching, utility work, tight lots, working around existing structures | Large pads, pond work, moving significant volume |
| Full-size excavator | Ponds, deep trenching, stump and root removal, loading trucks, demolition | Fine finish grading over a large flat area |
| Dozer | Bulk cut and fill, pushing material, spreading and shaping large pads | Precise digging, working close to a structure, tight access |
| Motor grader / box blade | Driveways, final surface grade, crowning long runs | Digging, any vertical work |
| Roller / compactor | Compacting pad lifts, driveway base | Anything that isn’t compaction |
A job that needs three of these is not a job for a contractor who owns one.
Why house pads on Montgomery County clay are their own problem
Clay does not drain. Water that lands on it either runs off the surface or sits there. That is why every pad we build is crowned and shaped to move water away — on clay, it has nowhere else to go. A flat pad on clay is a bathtub.
Clay shrinks and swells. It expands when it takes on moisture and contracts when it dries out, and that seasonal movement is what cracks slabs, driveways and brick. You cannot eliminate it. What you can do is build the pad so moisture under the slab stays as stable as possible: proper compaction in lifts, moisture conditioning of the fill as it goes down, and drainage that keeps water from ponding against the edge.
Compaction has to be specified, not assumed. “We’ll level it out” is not a spec. For a pad that’s taking a slab, the quote should say what the fill is, how thick the lifts are, and that it’s being compacted — not just spread. This is the single most common gap between a cheap pad quote and a good one, and it is invisible until it isn’t.
Elevation relative to everything around it decides the outcome. Where the road sits, where the ditch runs, which way the neighbor’s ground slopes, where the water goes in a real storm. A pad that’s beautifully built at the wrong height is still a problem.
The pad wants to sit before the slab goes on it. Fill placed and compacted properly still benefits from a little time and a rain event or two before concrete. If your schedule allows it, take it.
Ponds, and the sand-pocket problem
Most of this county will hold a pond without a liner, because clay is exactly what you want at the bottom of one. But “most” is doing work in that sentence.
Not all of the county is clay. Along parts of the creek systems — the San Jacinto, Lake Creek, Spring Creek and their smaller tributaries — you hit sandier soil and sand lenses. A pond dug into a sand pocket drains, and no amount of packing the surface fixes it.
The fix is a keyed clay core, not hope. Where the soil is mixed, the dam and often the pond bottom need a clay core cut into undisturbed material below the sand and built up in compacted lifts. That’s more work than digging a hole, and it’s why a pond quote should say whether the soil has been checked.
The spoil has to go somewhere. Digging a pond generates a large volume of dirt. If there is somewhere on the property to place it — a pad, a low spot, a berm — that dirt is an asset. If it has to leave the property, that’s trucks, and hauling material off site frequently costs more than the digging did.
Ponds near a creek may sit in a regulated floodplain. Properties along the San Jacinto, Lake Creek and Spring Creek carry floodplain designations, and some low ground meets wetland criteria. Moving dirt in a regulated floodplain can require a permit depending on the jurisdiction. Worth confirming before anyone digs.
Cut, fill, and the questions that decide your number
These are the things we look at before quoting, and the things you should ask any excavation contractor about.
Is the site balanced? If the cut and the fill roughly match, material stays on site and you’re paying for machine time. If they don’t, you’re paying for trucks. Ask whether the quote assumes balanced earthwork or imported fill.
Where is the spoil going? On site or off site. This is often the largest single swing in a dirt job.
What is the access like? A machine that can drive in is simple. A machine that needs a lowboy, or a site you have to cut a path into before anything can get to the work, is a different job.
Has the property been cleared? Excavation on uncleared land isn’t excavation — it’s clearing, then excavation. Two scopes of work. See land clearing and forestry mulching.
Are there stumps and root balls in the footprint? Organic material under a pad rots and leaves voids. Stumps have to come out and organics have to be stripped before fill goes down. See stump grinding and removal.
What’s buried out there? On older homestead acreage it’s routine to find an abandoned water well, an old septic tank, a slab under the grass, or buried farm debris. Abandoned wells must be plugged to state standards. Finding this before the quote is cheaper than finding it during the work.
Is any of this in a floodplain? Same answer as the pond section. Check first.
Wet season, rutting, and why we may move your date
Saturated clay doesn’t just rut, it deforms. A tracked machine crossing wet clay presses the structure out of the top foot or two of soil. That layer is exactly the material your pad is going to be built on, and you don’t get it back by blading the ruts flat. You get it back by stripping the remolded material and replacing it, or by waiting out a season. On a site that’s about to take a slab, that isn’t cosmetic damage — it’s a change to the subgrade.
Ground here is at its most workable from roughly late fall into early spring. Clay that will carry a loaded machine without deforming, and moisture close enough to optimum that fill will actually take compaction, mostly happen in the same few months. It’s also when everyone else wants pad work done, so the window is tight from both ends.
So we move dates. Paying to strip and replace a subgrade somebody ruined in a wet week means paying twice for the same ground. Anyone who tells you wet weather doesn’t matter to tracked equipment is quoting a pad he won’t be standing on in three years.
Or start your free quote right here:
Common questions
Do you clear the land too? Yes. On raw acreage it’s usually one crew doing the clearing and the dirt work, which saves a mobilization. See land clearing.
How long does a house pad take? Most residential pads are a small number of days of machine time, plus however long it takes for moisture conditions to be right. The waiting is usually weather, not work.
Can you dig a pond that will actually hold water? On most Montgomery County clay, yes. We look at the soil before committing to it, and if it’s sandy we’ll tell you what it would take — usually a keyed clay core — rather than dig a hole that drains.
Do I need a permit? For private dirt work on your own acreage outside a city limit and outside a floodplain, often not. Floodplain work, anything that changes drainage onto a neighbor, and any work inside a city limit can be different. Requirements vary by jurisdiction — we’ll flag it if what you’re describing raises the question.
Do you haul in fill dirt? Yes, and it’s scoped separately so you can compare importing material against balancing on site.
What size equipment do you run? Sized to the job — see the machine table above. Small-access lots and twenty-acre cuts are not the same work.
Can you build the driveway and set the culvert? Yes. On acreage the driveway usually has to exist before anything else can happen, so it’s often the first thing we build.
Do you do site prep for a barndominium? Yes — clearing, pad, driveway and drainage as one project. See site prep and grading.
Before you collect quotes, it’s worth reading how dirt work gets priced — access, haul distance and whether the site balances matter more than the acreage does.