What Slows Down a Sitework Job and How We Avoid It
You have a lot, a builder lined up, and a start date in your head, and you want to know what is going to get in the way. It is nearly always one of the same six things, and most of them get decided before a machine ever shows up. Here is each one and what we do on every job to get ahead of it.
Paperwork that has not been started
This is the big one. Most of the work on a lot sits behind paperwork with the county, and what your parcel needs depends on the parcel. The stall happens when the paperwork gets started after the survey, after the plans, and after the crew is scheduled, so the machines sit while it catches up.
What we do is ask on the first call. Before we price a lot we want to know where you are with the county, and if the answer is nowhere, we help you work out who to ask so you can start it while the survey and site plan are still in progress. Every parcel is different and the county is the one who tells you.
No survey, no line to clear to
We will not clear to a line we cannot see. A boundary survey with the corners flagged tells the crew where your lot stops and the neighbor's starts, and an operator guessing at that line is how you end up in a problem with the neighbors. On a lot with any fall to it, or any place that holds water, a topographic survey tells us where the water wants to go before we move dirt.
The stall is a lot with no survey, or one so old the corner pins are buried under palmetto. What we do is put the survey on the list of what we need before we mobilize, and if the corners are gone, the surveyor comes back out before we schedule the crew.
Rain on clay
Storm season on this coast is not gentle, and it treats the two kinds of dirt here differently. The sugar sand around Navarre, Gulf Breeze and Destin drains from the top and firms up quick. The clay and hardpan inland, toward Milton, Pace, Crestview, Baker and DeFuniak Springs, and through the Yellow River and Blackwater bottoms, holds water long after the sky clears. A dozer on wet clay does not grade, it churns.
What we do is sequence around it. Zach schedules the sand lots for the wet stretches and pushes the clay lots into the drier windows where the calendar allows. On a clay lot we rough grade early so the ground sheds water while we are on it, and we do not put a machine on soaked clay just to say we showed up. That looks like a delay from the driveway. It is the opposite.
Elevations nobody settled
How high the pad sits decides how much fill it takes, which decides a big piece of the budget. That number comes from your builder, your designer and the county office that handles it, off your own parcel, and it needs to be in writing before the pad goes up. The stall is a pad built to a guess, or a neighbor's number, then raised or cut after the fact, so the same dirt gets handled twice.
What we do is refuse to build a pad to a number nobody has confirmed. We ask for the finished floor elevation before the first load leaves the pit, and if it is not settled we help you get it settled. Near the bays and bayous this is the question that most often holds a job, and the one where a wrong answer costs the most to fix.
Decisions made after the machines arrive
The house moves after the lot is cleared. A tree that was coming out is now a keeper, after the dozer is parked next to it. A detached garage appears on the plan after the pad is graded. Every one of those is a change order, and every change order is a stall, because the crew has to stop, move the flags, regrade, and sometimes haul dirt back in.
What we do is walk the lot with you before we mobilize and flag everything on the ground together. House corners, driveway line, the edge of the clearing, every keeper tree. Standing on the lot with the tape in your hand is when people change their minds, and that is the cheap time to do it. It is part of how we run site preparation on every lot, and it is the biggest thing that keeps a job moving.
Access
Everything is ready and the tri axle cannot get down the drive. A gate too narrow, limbs too low, a soft shoulder that swallows a loaded truck, a shared drive with a neighbor who did not know trucks were coming, no place to turn around, no place to set a roll off. Access problems do not show up on plans. They show up with the first truck.
What we do is look at access on the same walk. Where the trucks come in, where they turn, where the debris gets staged, where the fill pile goes, and whether the way in will hold a loaded truck after a rain. If limbs need to come down or the shoulder needs rock before the trucks roll, we say so up front.
None of these six are surprises to us anymore. They are the checklist. A job that starts with the paperwork moving, the corners flagged, the elevation in writing, the lot walked together, and the way in sorted out mostly just runs.
NOBL Sitework is a licensed general contractor (CGC1537340) doing site preparation across Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, Walton, Escambia and Bay counties. If you want your job to be one of the ones that runs, call us at 850-238-3307 and we will walk the lot with you and go through the list before anything is scheduled.
