Excavation in Lantzville

What's different about digging in Lantzville?

Lantzville is its own incorporated district, not an RDN electoral area, and a lot of properties still run on septic even where sewer is available. We check for a septic field and a well before we dig, not just locates.

What does the ground itself do to a dig?

Three things sit under most properties around here and each behaves differently once you open it up. Dense glacial till is slow to cut and hard on teeth, but it stands close to vertical, so the hole stays roughly the size you dug it. The work is in the breaking, not the moving.

Well-draining sand is the opposite. It comes out fast and a machine gets through it quickly, but it will not hold a face at all — the sides run in as you go, so the cut opens wider than the trench you actually need. You pay for that twice: once moving the extra material out, and again bringing backfill in to put it back.

Then there is the sandstone and shale underneath both of them. Where bedrock comes up shallow the job stops being excavation and becomes breaking, and the rate follows the change, because a hammer moves a fraction of what a bucket does in an hour.

None of this is guesswork on the day. We read what has already been dug nearby, look at what is exposed on your property, and check the depth you actually need before we quote. A test pit is cheap next to a foundation dig that turns into a rock job halfway through, so where there is real doubt we would rather open one first.