Excavation and Demolition Across Buffalo and Western New York

What we do, and how one job leads to the next

Our services sort into a handful of kinds of work, and most real projects touch two or three of them.

• Dig: excavation for basements, footers, additions and trenches, plus new in-ground pool digs and pond construction.
• Demolish: whole-house demolition, garage tear-downs, driveway rip-outs, and removing or filling in old pools.
• Build: new houses and additions from the footings up, plus foundations and basements, including replacing a failed block wall.
• Water, sewer and utilities: sewer lateral replacement and repair, water services and conduit trenching, and storm drainage like French drains, catch basins and downspout lines.
• Land and finish: clearing and forestry mulching, grading, gravel drives, private roads and the stone base under parking lots, then hydroseed on any bare yard.

A garage replacement shows how they chain together. The old building and slab come out, the new foundation goes in, a buried drain or power feed gets handled while the ground is open, and the yard is graded and seeded at the end. Keeping that chain with one contractor means nobody hands you a half-filled hole and leaves.

Sand on clay, frost that won't sit still, and old pipe

The USDA's official description of the Cheektowaga soil series, taken from a site in the Town of Clarence, is a good picture of why lake-plain ground is hard to dig dry: sandy soil on top, then firm, layered silty clay starting 20 to 40 inches down. Water moves through the sand quickly and through the clay slowly or barely at all, so it perches on the clay. Dig down into the clay and the water held in the sand above it seeps in through the sides of the hole.

Frost is the second variable. Readings from a National Weather Service frost gauge in North Tonawanda, which the agency labels unofficial, show how much it swings: on January 30 the ground was fully thawed in 2013, frozen 15 inches deep in 2014, and frozen only between 4 and 7 inches down in 2015. The same NWS page notes that snow is left in place around its gauges and insulates the ground, so in very cold weather bare or plowed ground can freeze deeper. Footings therefore go to the depth your building department requires, not to whatever last winter did.

Then there's age. In both counties, Census figures date more than half of the housing to before 1960 and nearly three homes in ten to before 1940. A lateral that old is often clay tile with root-prone joints or Orangeburg fiber pipe, which flattens as it ages.

How a job moves from your first call to finished grade

1. You call, text or email. Send the address and a sentence about the job. A few photos of the work area help.
2. We walk the site. Machine access, overhead wires, trees, standing water, where debris and spoils can go, and clues to buried lines all get checked before we price it.
3. Permits and surveys. Your city, town or village issues the permits, and the rules differ, so we confirm them with that office. Before a structure comes down, the owner needs an asbestos survey under 12 NYCRR Part 56, done by a state-credentialed inspector whatever year the building dates from, and copies go to the permit office and the Labor Department's Asbestos Control Bureau.
4. 811 before any digging. State law gives the contractor a set window for the UDig NY locate request: not more than ten working days out, and at minimum two full working days, before the dig starts. Member utilities mark their own lines, and every one notified has to respond before digging starts. Private lines on your property, like a feed to a garage or a sump discharge, are not theirs to mark, so we ask about them.
5. The work, then the finish. Demolition or excavation, pipe or foundation work, backfill placed and compacted in lifts, then final grade with topsoil and seed or stone.

Where we work across Erie and Niagara counties

Our service area covers the City of Buffalo plus Amherst, Cheektowaga, Tonawanda, Kenmore, West Seneca, Hamburg, Orchard Park, Lancaster, Clarence, Williamsville, Grand Island, North Tonawanda, Lockport, Niagara Falls and East Aurora. The service areas page has notes on each one.

Those names are not all the same kind of place, and that matters for paperwork. Buffalo, Niagara Falls and North Tonawanda are cities, while the name Lockport covers two municipalities: the City of Lockport and the Town of Lockport. Amherst, Cheektowaga and Grand Island are towns, while Kenmore, Williamsville and East Aurora are villages inside larger towns. Depending on the address, the permit office may belong to a city, a town or a village, and sewer service may come from a city, a town or a county sewer district.

So before we price a sewer lateral, a tear-down or a new foundation, we find out which office issues the permit, which one inspects the work, and who owns which part of the pipe at that address. It's a short phone call that prevents a long delay.

Homeowner lots and commercial sites call for different plans

On a residential job the family usually keeps living in the house, and the plan has to allow for that. A path to the door and the garage stays open where possible, and the work is laid out around any septic tank or propane line, the lawn and the neighbor's fence. Typical homeowner projects are garage tear-downs, driveway rip-outs, pool fill-ins, sewer laterals, additions and soggy-yard drainage.

Commercial work usually starts from someone else's drawings. An engineered site plan sets the grades, the storm pipe and the utility runs, and the work is sequenced around inspections and other trades: clearing, stripping and stockpiling topsoil, cut and fill, underground pipe and conduit, then a compacted stone base ready for paving. Bigger disturbed areas usually need erosion controls like silt fence in place before the first cut. Our site work and site development covers that full run, from raw land to a lot a paving crew can pull onto.