4 Services an Excavating Contractor Can Provide

When people hear "excavating," they picture a machine digging a hole. That's part of it, but the machines and the knowledge behind them do a good deal more. A contractor with the right equipment and a crew that knows the ground can turn a wooded lot into a building site, take down a worn-out building, put in the system that handles a home's wastewater, or build a pond. Here are four services an excavating contractor can provide, with a look at how we handle each one at Oesch Excavating.

1. Land clearing and site prep

Before anything gets built, the ground has to be ready. Land clearing means taking out trees, brush and rubbish so the lot is open and usable. We clear the lot, dispose of the trees, and haul off the rubbish so you aren't left with piles to deal with. Site prep comes next, and it covers the groundwork for foundations, road building and geothermal installs.

Land clearing isn't only for building lots. Our galleries include deer plots, laser trenching and wet land trenching, because people in Northern Michigan clear ground for all kinds of reasons. Jamie Cutler had us clear about 3/4 of an acre for camping and put a nice road around his 12 acres. His land had been logged in 2018 and had stumps everywhere. He wrote that we "removed the stumps and filled in the holes for me."

2. Demolition

Taking down a building safely takes more planning than most people expect. Over more than 30 years we've done controlled demolition of hundreds of buildings, residential and commercial. Steel, wood and concrete all come down differently, and we handle all three. When a job calls for it we use liquid oxygen cutting, which is how heavy steel gets cut apart cleanly.

The part customers care about most is what's left when we're done. We dispose of all the materials and leave the site clean. If there is land around the structure that needs clearing too, we can take care of that in the same visit. A typical home demolition takes one or two days. Our galleries show the range: a big house, a farm house, a small cabin, a lake house torn down for a rebuild, and commercial work with scrap metal removal.

3. Septic system installs

A septic system is one of the few parts of a property you never want to think about twice, which is why it needs to be done carefully the first time. We install systems for homes and commercial properties. The work starts with a laser measuring system to lay out the planned location, and we file all the permit paperwork. Then we excavate, supply all the materials from our own quarry, install the entire system, and remove and dispose of the old system.

Jim Yahrmarkt hired Tom to install his septic system and do the excavating. His lot was hard to grade, with tree removal and a heavy rock base. He wrote, "His eye for detail is amazing," and called the result "an end product we are very proud of." We cover the steps of an install in more detail in another article on this blog.

4. Ponds, lakes and shorelines

Building a pond is excavating at its most visible. We build new ponds and lakes, restore and reconstruct shorelines, and repair dikes and dams. Soft ground is common up here, and a standard dozer can bog down in it, so we use a low ground-pressure bulldozer that spreads its weight and stays on top.

Seth Tuuri had us dig a pond at his hunting camp, in a spot that was flooding out their roads. We also put in a silt pond with culverts and built up the road around it. He wrote that it's "a great design," that it's stocked with trout, and that his kids swim in it all summer. A pond done right ends up as part of the property that people use, not a hole in the yard.

And the work around the edges

These four are only the start. The same crews and machines also handle the jobs that tend to come with them:

• Road building: gravel or hard-surface roads and driveways, including residential driveways, property access roads and development roads.
• Tree services: trimming and removal for homes and businesses, including stump and root removal.
• Materials and supplies: sand, stone, fill dirt, screened topsoil, culvert pipe and more.
• Basement backfill and drainage repair, which show up in our gallery of finished work.

Laurie Marr called us for a driveway. She wrote that after talking with Tom, "he knew exactly what we wanted and it ended even better than what we expected." Having one company handle the clearing, the grading and the hauling means fewer phone calls for you and fewer places for the plan to drift.

Picking the right place to start

If you aren't sure which service your project needs, that's a normal place to be. Plenty of jobs are a mix. A new camp might need land clearing, a driveway, a pond and a septic system, in that order. Walking the property with a contractor is the quickest way to sort out the sequence, and it's what we do before we put a number on anything.

You can see everything we do on our Services page. When you're ready to talk about your property, call (989) 742-1003 and ask for a free estimate. We serve all of Northern Michigan, including Hillman, Gaylord and Alpena.