04
Site work
Land clearing and preparation, excavation, grading, levelling, trenching and backhoe services. The grade comes first, and everything built above it depends on getting that right.
Chapter 01
Everything expensive above ground is decided down here
Site work is the stage nobody photographs and the one that determines whether the rest of the project behaves. Get the levels and the drainage right and a foundation, a slab or a paved area sits quietly for decades. Get them wrong and every trade that follows is building on a problem, and the cost of fixing it multiplies with each layer added on top.
The failures we get called to look at are consistent. Water arriving at a building instead of leaving it, because the finished ground falls the wrong way. Settlement under a slab where fill was placed in one deep lift and never properly compacted. Services laid at the wrong depth or in the wrong sequence, so a later trade has to dig back through finished work to reach them.
In a built-up part of northern New Jersey there is a further constraint that greenfield sites do not have: neighbours, boundaries, existing services and access. A tight urban lot changes what machine can physically work where, and that has to be understood before anyone quotes a programme.
Adamo Brothers crew grading a cleared lot in northern New Jersey with a surveyor's level, excavator and string lines set out
Clearing, cutting and setting the levels
We start by establishing levels across the whole site rather than working off the existing surface, which is very often not flat and not where the finished ground should be. Clearing and soil removal follow, with material either kept for reuse on site where it is suitable or taken away where it is not. Trenching for services and drainage is planned in the right order so nothing has to be dug twice.
Fill goes back in compacted lifts, and the finished formation is graded and levelled to the falls the project actually needs, not simply made flat. Grading is where a set of drawings turns into something water can be relied on to obey, and it is the part we will not rush, because a foundation or a paved surface placed on a poor formation is a defect that shows up long after everyone has left.
We run our own backhoes and operators out of the Ridgefield yard, and our operators and labourers have been with the company for over twenty years. That matters more on site work than almost anywhere else, because reading ground correctly is experience rather than specification, and the machine work in a tight space is a skill.
Chapter 03
Carrying it through to finished work
The advantage of having the ground and the finished surfaces done by one contractor is that the handover risk disappears. We can take a site from clearing and grading through the foundations, the drainage, the flatwork and the finished masonry without a gap where one company's responsibility ends and another's has not started. On residential and commercial jobs alike that is usually where programmes slip.
It also means the levels we set are the levels we then build to. When the same company is accountable for the formation and for the slab or the paving that lands on it, there is no argument available about whose tolerance was wrong.
If you are planning something and are not sure whether the site is straightforward or awkward, that is worth a conversation before design is fixed. Call (201) 945-0064 with the address and we will come and walk it with you.
Adamo Brothers. Fully licensed, bonded and insured. NJ Home Improvement Contractor Lic. #13VH00015800. Call (201) 945-0064.