Foundation installation in Pomona CA - set on ground we've checked and packed

Most people call me with drawings in hand and a lot that's bare or about to be. The price moves with the foundation type, the size of the footprint, how much digging and grading the ground needs and anything the soil check turns up. The schedule depends on that same prep work and on any permit, more than on the pour itself. If you've already settled on a slab, our slab foundation building page goes deeper, and either way the written estimate I send after seeing the lot gives you your own figure.

The job starts before anybody picks up a shovel. I walk the lot and ask about old fence lines, broken pipes and bad drainage, because those cause trouble a good design can't fix. Then I lay out slab or crawl space plainly, based on how you'll use the house and how much risk your budget can carry. Once that's settled, my crew grades the site and digs out and packs the subgrade, the ground the concrete sits on. Next they set the forms and tie the rebar, steel that holds the concrete together so cracks don't spread. We pour and finish, then let it cure, a wait while the concrete hardens and gains strength before anything gets built on it. If the budget has to give somewhere, I'd cut the finish before the base, because nobody sees the ground on day one and everybody sees what it did a few years later. I'd rather lose a bid than pour on bad ground.

Foundations rarely come alone. Crawl space walls and heavy additions usually sit on concrete footings, wider strips of concrete that spread the weight into firm ground, and we pour those as part of the same job. Builders and property managers putting up a new building often need a concrete parking lot as well, and using one crew for both means the grading and drainage get planned as one site.

On a house job, the soil gets checked before anything else. California requires cities and counties to use the state's mapped liquefaction zones, areas where strong shaking can make wet ground act loose, when they issue permits. In those zones, the soil under any building people live in has to be investigated before the foundation goes in. Whether your lot sits in one of those zones is something a site check shows, so I won't guess on the phone. When the job needs a permit, we pull it and handle the paperwork with the city. If you'd like to ask questions yourself, Pomona's Building and Safety office at City Hall takes walk-ins Monday through Thursday, 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. It answers at 909-620-2371 in English and Spanish and accepts plans electronically.

Many lots we build on here have had a house, a garage or a garden on them before, so we expect leftovers in the ground and keep digging until we reach firm dirt. We're based in Pomona and work in the cities around it, and we find the same kind of buried surprises on jobs in Ontario and Claremont.