LassiterExcavatingStaff | Drilling and Excavation Blog

Three Steps to Prepare Your Home Foundation for the Rainy Season

Your foundation supports your entire home. Inspect it annually for cracks and other damage.

With the Northern California winter season arriving in October, as a homeowner you should take some steps to prepare your foundation to survive the colder, wetter weather. Your foundation is quite literally the base for your home’s entire structure, supporting everything inside your home. Make it an annual habit to review where your foundation stands and how the stress of winter rains and water flow may impact it.Make a visual inspection Continue reading

The Demolition Process in Construction

For most landscaping and construction projects with existing structures on the property, one of the first steps is demolition of existing features like pools, garages or in-law units. Each job is unique, especially where there is limited access, but demolition can be pretty straightforward and doesn’t have to take a lot of time. However, the most important thing is to understand what the plan is, and the tools and manpower we need to bring to bear.

Construction Demolition Methods

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To Remove Your Pool or Not To Remove Your Pool

Are you on the brink of deciding to remove your swimming pool?

Here are some facts that may help you dive into the decision process.

With the close of the summer season here in Northern California, pool owners are once again assessing just how much they used their pool this year. And they are posing the big question again: Is it time to pull the pool out and transform the backyard?

Pool Ownership Costs Add Up

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Why Use Foam in Pool Construction?

We have been contracted by a number of pool installers this year to assist them in installing pools using “geofoam” as part of the design. There are some very good reasons why you would want to use this foam material in pool construction, as well as in other construction applications. With regard to pool construction, Geofoam is a great choice because it simplifies the construction process itself. It provides a medium onto which the concrete can be directly formed, rather than going through a more expensive process of forming and filling structures entirely of concrete.

The Creative Use of Geofoam in Pool Construction

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How to Choose an Excavation Contractor

When you choose a builder, landscaper or pool company, you also are choosing numerous other sub-contractors that will work in conjunction with the primary contractor you have chosen. This is especially true when heavy excavation or drilling is part of the project. Few contractors do this type of work themselves (in-house) because the equipment investment is very high, and the training needed get it done efficiently and safely make it prohibitive for contractor to do it themselves.

Landscapers Often Use Excavation and Drilling Specialists

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Installing Pools in Tight Residential Lots

In Northern California many houses sit packed together on small plots. With homes of 2,500 square feet or more sitting on a lot of 5,000 sq. ft. This can present some serious challenges if you’re thinking of installing a nice swimming pool, but it’s certainly not impossible. If you’ve been told a pool can’t be built in your yard there is a good chance the company you are talking with doesn’t want to bother. Or they don’t have people with the expertise to do it.

Tight Home Lots Make for Complex Excavation Work

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How Rebar Reinforces Concrete in Construction

The inclusion of reinforcement bars (‘rebar’) in concrete construction is a method that adds long-term strength to the concrete used to build foundations, walls, pools, pads and other structures. Concrete handles compression well, but without rebar would perform less well under tension or torsion (stretching and twisting). Load-bearing structures like foundations or walls need to handle multiple pressures from lateral and horizontal tension, compression and torsion. Rebar works well with concrete because these materials expand and contract at the same rate when temperatures change. Continue reading “How Rebar Reinforces Concrete in Construction”

Using Piers and Piles to Shore Up Sagging Foundations

Pier drilling and pile driving are techniques used for driving pier or piles into the ground underneath a structure to shore up sinking or sagging building foundations, bringing them back to their proper level and preventing further foundation settlement.

Also called “piering,” this method involves the use of strategically placed mechanical jacks to slowly and carefully lift the settled foundation beam to grade. Once raised, the beam is held to elevation by attaching it firmly to the piers.

There are two common types of foundation piers: Continue reading “Using Piers and Piles to Shore Up Sagging Foundations”

Using 4Rs to Manage Our Construction Waste

In the past, it was a common practice during the demolition of buildings or other structures to simply cart the waste materials away to a landfill. Today however, the growing cost of disposal and new materials, has put a greater emphasis on recycling old materials. De-constructing is an approach that involves a more careful disassembly of a structure so that parts of it can be reused or recycled. This has given a whole new face to waste management, one which reduces the amount of materials put into landfills, reduces the demand for precious natural resources and, best of all reduces the cost to the consumer.

The 4R’s of Construction Waste Management

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What Influences the Cost to Remove a Pool?

No swimming pool lasts forever. At some point, every in-ground swimming pool built will meet the same fate: Demolition. Oh sure, there will be a few hangers-on like old classic cars, but the majority of pools will be removed at some point. The reasons homeowners remove their pools are too numerous to cover in this article, but once this decision is made the cost discussion begins.

What is Involved with Pool Replacement?

When deciding to convert back yard space from pool to another use, multiple factors influence the cost. Continue reading “What Influences the Cost to Remove a Pool?”