Groundworks

Site clearance and strip-out of topsoil, bulk excavation and cut-and-fill to levels, foundations — strip, pad or raft depending on what the engineer specifies — rising walls, hardcore and radon membranes, floor slabs, foul and surface water drainage, soakaways and attenuation, service ducting for water, power and communications, and retaining structures where ground levels change.

The same team also handles hard landscaping at the end of a project: driveways, patios, steps, kerbing, boundary walls and drainage to finished areas, so the site is left usable rather than a churned-up field with a new house standing in it.

Setting out comes first and is checked against the engineer's drawings and the site boundaries before a bucket goes in the ground. Levels are the thing that quietly costs money later — a slab set wrong by a hundred millimetres works its way through door thresholds, drainage falls and finished ground levels for the rest of the build.

Ground conditions decide method. Soft spots, high water table, rock, made ground and existing services all change the approach, and we would rather find them with a trial hole early than with a machine mid-dig. Excavated material is managed on site where it can be reused and removed properly where it cannot.

You get an itemised estimate and a programme, and because groundworks is weather- exposed we will be straight with you about what a wet fortnight does to it. Access, wheel wash, road cleanliness and neighbour disruption are planned in advance — particularly on tighter urban sites in Dublin and around the larger Kildare towns.

Drainage is tested and recorded, foundations and reinforcement are inspected before pours, and the stage sign-offs your engineer or certifier needs are built into the programme rather than arranged around it.

We supervise excavator operators, groundworkers, steel fixers, concrete suppliers, blocklayers and drainage contractors. Machinery comes from our own plant, which means the right machine turns up for the ground conditions rather than whatever was available. Where groundworks is one stage of a larger job, the same programme carries straight on into the structure, carpentry and interior trades, so nothing is handed over between contractors.