Where We Dig

When does the paperwork have to be done?

Before the machine arrives, not while it is here — and that is a scheduling fact more than a legal one. A building permit is generally required before any stage of a project begins, and excavation counts as a stage, so the permit does not run alongside the dig; it gates it. Fees run from roughly $150 to $1,000 depending on the value of the work, and processing takes as long as the bylaw takes.

What that means in practice is that the order of operations matters more than the individual steps. If you want to break ground in a particular week, the permit application and the locate request both have to work backwards from that week rather than forwards from the day you decided to go ahead. The two run in parallel, so whichever is slower sets your earliest realistic start.

We handle working out which stage of the process your project actually needs. That is a genuinely confusing part for most people, because the answer depends on what you are building rather than on how much digging is involved — a large cut for a simple structure can need less than a small cut for a complicated one. Not everything needs a permit at all: a retaining structure under a metre, holding back under a metre of earth, sits outside the requirement, and plenty of drainage work, driveway work and general site tidying does too.

Where a job does need one, we will not start the excavation ahead of it. That is not caution for its own sake — starting early can mean an inspection fails on something that then has to be dug up twice, and there is no version of that which is cheaper than waiting. So tell us the date you are hoping for as early as you can, even roughly. Anything with a waiting period attached can be started in the background while the scope is still being worked out, and almost every delayed dig we see was held up by something that could have been filed weeks earlier.

Why the ground changes across the district

Most of this district sits on Nanaimo Group sandstone and shale under a blanket of glacial till that runs around twelve metres deep across the Nanaimo Lowland, with pockets of well-draining Quadra Sand closer to the water. That matters to your quote more than the size of your house does. Sand digs fast and won't hold a face, so the cut goes wider and we move more material. Till is dense and slow and will stand near vertical, so machine class drives the schedule instead of volume. Where bedrock comes up, the job changes from digging to breaking and the rate changes with it. We work out which one you've got at the site walk rather than assuming from the postcode.