Concrete footings in Saratoga CA - a foundation that starts on solid, inspected ground

Most people call me when they've got an addition or a new house on paper and want to know what happens before the walls go up. The price moves with how much footing your plans call for, how much steel goes in, how hard the ground is to dig and how close we can get the concrete truck, which on a sloped lot can take some planning. The schedule mostly turns on the city's plan review and its inspection of the trenches, not on how fast we can dig. I'll come out, look at the lot and your plans, and write you an estimate for your own job.

We start with paper, not shovels. I get your plans and any soil report in hand before we dig, because the foundation plan shows where every footing, pier and piece of steel goes, and the soil report says what the ground can carry. Then our crew digs the trenches the plans call for, sets the forms, the boards that hold the concrete's shape, and ties in the rebar, the steel bars that keep the concrete working as one piece when the ground shifts. We hold the pour until the trenches and steel have passed the city's inspection, then pour, finish the tops and let the concrete cure, the slow hardening that gives it its strength, before anyone builds on it. None of this shows once the walls are up, so it's the last place I'd trim a budget, and I'll tell you now that concrete shows some cracking over time even when the work under it is done right.

Footings don't always go into bare dirt. If part of your house has already settled, foundation raising may need to come first, and when a new footing has to run under an existing patio or garage floor, we use concrete cutting to open a clean slot instead of breaking out the whole slab.

A lot of Saratoga sits on hillsides or near creeks, and that can add a step before any digging starts. The city asks for geotechnical clearance when a new structure, a basement or an addition to one sits in an area with geologic hazards, and it names hillsides, where the ground can slide, and land near creeks, where wet soil can turn soft in an earthquake, as examples. The state's seismic mapping rules leave out most single family frame houses of up to two stories, but the city can ask for more than the state does, so on these lots we go by what the city's review says and build that wait into the plan.

Big trees are the other thing we plan around here. The city wants an arborist to review a building permit when a protected tree's dripline, the outer edge of its canopy, comes within five feet of the work, and that includes your neighbor's trees, so I look up as well as down on the first visit. We're based in Saratoga and see the same slopes and old trees on jobs in Los Gatos and Cupertino, along with the other cities around it.