Dirt Work

An overview...

We built a 2,800 square foot building last summer and the education received was invaluable. Putting down some of the tidbits may help someone else who is not a professional builder or contractor so that the job will be understood and budgeted for. Some of the things that I'll go over in this writing won't have anything to do with the actual structure, but will nevertheless impact the overall budget of the project.

Who would have thought that “Dirt Work” would cost so much? What the dirt work consists of for your project may or may not be as extensive as ours but then again, it may be more. In our area of North Idaho trees needed to be cut down to make room for the actual structure. Once the trees were cut down then the stumps needed to be pulled out. Do not make the mistake of simply grinding the stumps into the ground. If you do you will risk the stump rotting under the building and undermining your foundation (unless you are doing stem wall construction). Slab-on-grade construction requires you to have a well compacted base of soil and gravel under your concrete slab. We chose the slab-on-grade method as the cost was nearly identical to doing a stem wall system.

Once the location is determined then the leveling can begin. Regardless of the foundation the building will sit on, it needs to be level. For the sake of this article we will only reference the slab-on-grade method as that is what we did. Another major reason for this choice was the fact that we wanted to put in radiant floor heating for the heating of the entire first floor.

Saving money is key to bringing in a project on a fixed budget and as long as you are willing to put in long hours and work hard, you will be able to do most of the actual construction yourself. I know that sounds daunting but really it is not. As this series goes along you will see that sub-contractors were used for various phases of the construction that we were not comfortable doing (or simply did not want to do).

Back to the dirt work... You will probably have to hire an operator with a small loader or Bobcat machine to help move the gravel you are going to buy and to level it onto the building site. We used 3”- (minus) rock for our base and for under the footings. We put down about a foot of this rock and every 4” or so we used a rented compacting machine to compress the rock. Once the 3”- was at the proper depth we put down another 6” of 3/4”- and compacted that into the other. Trust me... you will want to figure out just how much rock you are going to need; how much digging you are going to have to do; are there trees to get rid of; Is there a driveway or access needed to the structure? All this is going to eat into your budget. By the time we did all this our dirt work had run approximately $5,000.