Site Grading and Earthwork

Grading is the scope that decides whether everything poured afterward behaves the way the plans say it should. We self-perform cut-and-fill, rough grading to subgrade, and fine grading to finish tolerance as our own crew, not a sub-of-a-sub layered under someone else's schedule — which matters in Arlington because the black clay under most sites here does not forgive shortcuts. Get the moisture content wrong on a pad and you find out eighteen months later when a slab starts telling on itself.

Most of our earthwork starts with a cut-and-fill balance: matching what a site produces against what the finish grades and building pads actually need, so a project is not trucking in fill it did not have to or hauling off spoil that should have stayed on-site as engineered fill. We build pads and subgrade to the geotechnical report's density and moisture targets, not only to a visual grade check, and we condition clay subgrade — wetting, drying, disking, and recompacting in lifts — until nuclear density testing confirms the pad will actually hold. That step gets skipped on a lot of jobs because it takes an extra day or two. It is also the single biggest reason a slab cracks or a floor goes out of flatness spec six months after turnover, so we do not skip it.

Rough grading gets a site to buildable subgrade and drainage direction; fine grading is the last pass before form work, laser or GPS-guided so pad elevations and slope percentages land within the tolerance a concrete crew actually needs, not only close. We build positive drainage into every grading pass — slope away from foundations, toward inlets and swales that match the civil drainage plan — because a pad that is flat or, worse, pitched the wrong way turns into a standing-water problem the first time North Texas gets a hard spring rain. On sites with erosion control obligations, we run SWPPP-compliant measures through the earthwork phase — silt fence, inlet protection, stabilized construction entrances, and disturbed-area logging — so a project stays inspection-ready instead of scrambling before a TCEQ or city site visit.

Because we self-perform both the earthwork and the concrete that follows it, grading here is not handed off cold to a foundation crew that finds problems after the fact. The same team tracking pad elevations is the team pouring on top of them, which cuts out the finger-pointing that happens when a grading sub and a concrete sub disagree about whose tolerance failed. We run this scope direct for owners and developers across Arlington, Grand Prairie, and Mansfield, and we bid it as a standalone earthwork package to general contractors who need a subcontractor that will hold pad grades to spec without a change order fight later.