Excavation and demolition services, from first dig to final seed

Five groups, sorted by what happens to the ground

The grid above lists all seventeen. Here's the logic behind the grouping, because the group usually tells you more than the name does.

• Demolition & Removal takes things out: whole-building demolition, garage tear-downs, pool removal and fill-ins (plus digs for new pools), and driveway rip-outs. Each removal leaves a hole or a bare pad that has to be filled, compacted or rebuilt.
• Excavation & Earthwork moves and shapes soil: excavation, grading, site work and development, land clearing with forestry mulching, and pond construction. If the ground itself is the project, start here.
• Building & Foundations puts structure on the ground: new home construction, home additions, and foundations and basements, from footers and slabs to block wall replacement.
• Sewer, Water & Utilities is trench work: sewer lateral replacement and tie-ins, underground utilities such as water services and electric or data conduit, and storm water drainage systems.
• Driveways & Finish Work closes a job out: stone-base driveways, roadways and parking lots, and hydroseeding to get bare soil back under grass.

Most people land in one group and end up touching a second. That's normal, and it's why the next two sections matter.

Not sure what to ask for? Start with the symptom

Homeowners rarely call asking for site work. They call because something is wrong or something is changing. Here are common starting points and where they usually lead.

Water sitting in the yard or seeping into the basement. First figure out whether the ground slopes the wrong way or the water simply has nowhere to go. A slope problem is fixed with regrading around the house. Water with no outlet needs a drainage system such as a French drain or catch basin. A wall that's already bowing inward belongs to the foundations group.

An old structure you want gone. A detached garage has its own service because it's smaller, often tucked behind the house, and often followed by a new slab. A house or commercial building is full demolition. If the lot will sit empty afterward, finish with grading and hydroseed rather than bare fill.

Slow drains or a backup at the basement floor drain. That often points at the sewer lateral, which is trench work. If the driveway sits over the line, plan the rip-out and the new stone base as part of the same job.

A wooded or empty lot you want to build on. That's the longest chain on the list: clearing, site work, excavation, foundations, utilities, then the driveway base and lawn. Our new home construction page walks through it step by step.

Teardown to topsoil: which job has to go first

When several services share one property, the sequence is set by what the next step would damage or bury. On a typical lot it runs like this:

1. Paperwork and marks. A building coming down needs an asbestos survey by a New York State asbestos inspector first, whatever year it was built. Then comes the 811 call, which New York's Code Rule 753 puts on the excavator for demolition as well as digging. The rule wants that notice filed between two and ten working days early, and the call date itself doesn't count toward either number.
2. Take out whatever is leaving: the building, the pool, the old driveway or the trees.
3. Dig and build below grade. Footings go at least as deep as the minimum your city, town or village lists in its residential code table, then come walls, drain tile and the slab.
4. Run pipe and conduit while trenches are open, before any stone covers them.
5. Backfill in compacted lifts and rough grade.
6. Top off and fine-grade the driveway or lot base, then final grade, with hydroseed last.

Skipping ahead means paying for the same ground twice. A new driveway laid over a sewer lateral or water service line that still needs replacing gets cut open again, and a foundation backfilled before its drain tile is set has to be dug back out.

Old lakebed clay and pre-1960 housing shape many jobs here

Two local facts explain why so many of these services end up on the same property. The first is the ground. In the USDA's 1986 soil survey of Erie County, the northern half and western edge of the county read as an abandoned lakebed, the Erie-Ontario lake plain, while the south climbs onto the Allegheny Plateau, where steep valley walls are common. On the plain, soils like Odessa formed in lake-laid clay and silt that pass water slowly or very slowly and hold a perched water table through winter and spring. In silty Niagara soils the water table rises to within 18 inches of the surface in those same months, and the survey warns that cuts in them can slump or slough.

The second is the housing. Census estimates show more than half of all housing units in Erie and Niagara counties were built before 1960, and roughly three in four before 1980. On a house that age, the sewer lateral, the detached garage, the block basement walls and the driveway can all have had decades of frost and wet clay working on them. A call about one is a good moment to look at the others, and our foundations and basements page covers what that clay does to walls.