Foundation installation in Tacoma WA - a solid base with drainage planned from day one

Most people who call about this are building new, adding on or replacing a foundation that's given out, and the first thing to settle is which kind to build. The price moves with that choice, with the size of the house and with how much dirt has to come out, and the schedule turns on the dig, the permit and the point where the new walls are held well enough to fill dirt back around them. I'll look at your lot and give you a written estimate so you can take your time with it, and if you already know you want a slab, our slab foundation page goes into more detail.

It starts at the estimate, where we talk through your budget and your house and weigh a slab against a crawl space or basement, because the right answer depends on both. Once you've picked, our crew lays out the footprint, digs it out and packs the ground under the footings, so the concrete sits on firm soil and not on loose dirt that settles later. We set the forms, tie in rebar, the steel bars that keep concrete from pulling apart under load, and pour. Drainage gets planned right alongside the walls instead of tacked on at the end, since water in the ground is usually where foundation trouble starts. If the budget gets tight, I'll steer you toward trimming something you can change later, not the dig, the base or the drainage, because all three get buried early and nobody gets back to them cheaply.

Every foundation sits on footings, the wider strips of concrete at the bottom that spread the weight of the walls into the ground, and if a deck, garage or addition only needs those, our concrete footings work covers it. Builders and property owners putting up a new building often need the paving around it too, and we handle concrete parking lot building once the structure is in.

Tacoma issues New Building permits for new or replaced structures and Alteration permits for changes to existing ones, and its list names additions but doesn't call out foundations by name, so ask the city's Planning and Development Services at (253) 591-5030 or Permits@tacoma.gov what your job needs. The dig counts here too, because the city reviews grading, cut and fill on private property under the residential building permit, and moving more than 50 cubic yards of dirt in and out calls for a separate Site Development permit. Before work starts we check which office covers your address and what it'll want to see, we handle the paperwork when a permit is called for, and if it's one you have to get yourself, we tell you what to bring.

The ground decides how deep and how wide the dig runs. Pierce County guidance puts frost at 12 inches below grade in low-lying areas and deeper at higher elevations, so our footings go below that line, and we check the elevation before digging on jobs up in South Hill. Washington's Department of Natural Resources also maps where wet, sandy soil can lose strength in an earthquake and where soil makes shaking worse, and you can look up your lot on its Geologic Information Portal before we plan anything. We're based in Tacoma and work in the cities around it in Pierce County and south King County, so we have the same conversation on jobs in Lakewood.