A finished gravel drive in low sunlight, cut through a stand of hardwoods
Bryson Homes excavating

Excavation & Site Work

Excavating · Construction · Consultation

Before there is a house, there is a site. We do that part too.

Own a piece of land and not sure what it takes to build on it? That is the most common question we get, and it usually has to be answered with a machine before it can be answered on paper.

We take on excavation and site work as its own job — whether or not we end up building the house. If you are planning a build with us, having the same people move the dirt and put up the walls means one site plan, one schedule, and nobody pointing at anybody else when something on the lot turns out to be harder than it looked.

Before and after

Four lots, photographed before we started and again when we finished.

  • A wooded rise before clearing — thin hardwoods and rough grass, nothing visible through the trees
    Before
    Open cleared ground looking out over a wide valley, wooded ridges running back to the horizon
    After

    Clearing is how the view arrives. It is usually there already, behind the trees.

  • Dense woodland with standing timber and fallen deadfall across the ground
    Before
    A cleared and graded building pad with fresh gravel, a wooded mountain rising beyond it
    After

    A building pad, graded and drained, with the drive run in to meet it.

  • A close stand of hardwoods in fall, trunks packed tight with no clear ground between them
    Before
    Cleared ground at dusk looking across a valley to a long ridge in fall color
    After

    Same job, later in the day. This is what a lot looks like once it can be built on.

  • Felled trunks and brush piled in a long row along the edge of a road
    Before
    A finished gravel drive curving away through the woods, shoulders graded either side
    After

    The trees come down, the debris goes, and the drive goes in where the trees were.

What that covers

  • Site work and lot clearing

    Clearing the building site, taking down trees and hauling away the debris that comes with them.

  • Driveways

    Cutting a road in to the building site and putting in the drive — often one of the larger line items on a rural lot, and the one people least expect.

  • Foundations and grading

    Digging the foundation and preparing the site with the drainage it needs before anything gets built on it.

  • Septic systems

    Class I and Class II systems. Where a septic field can go governs where the house can sit, which is why it belongs in the site plan and not at the end.

  • Underground utilities

    Burying electric and phone lines in from the road.

And then a house goes on it

These roads and pads were shot on one camera card in the fall of 2010. Part way through that same card, a finished house stands on the same ridge, in the same light — green metal roof, covered entry, gravel drive run up to the door.

  • A wide graded pad on a ridge top, machine tracks curving across the fresh surface, layered blue mountains beyond the fall treetops
    The ground
  • A log home with a green metal roof and a covered entry, gravel drive running up to it
    Further along the same card

Which pad it stands on we cannot tell you — the ridge was cut into several lots and nobody wrote down which frame is which. What the two photographs do show is one afternoon: the ground, and then a house on it.

The rest of that ridge is in the excavation photographs, and the house is under Lot 127.

Tell us about the property

Send the address or the parcel number and roughly what you have in mind. If it is a site we can get to, we will come and look at it.

Get in touch (304) 496-9839