PIERCE
LAND
CLEARING
Pads, ranch roads, cut and fill and rock work across the Driftwood and Wimberley country. Shallow soil over limestone, live oaks worth keeping, and drives that have to be built rather than found.
Driftwood is Hill Country in the older sense: bigger tracts, fewer subdivisions, and ground that has not been touched in a long time. Limestone sits close to the surface across most of it, the live oaks are usually the reason somebody bought the place, and the draws running down to Onion Creek dictate where anything can practically be built.
The work here is rarely a clean open cut. It is threading a pad or a drive through oaks that have to survive, on ground where the rock depth changes every fifty feet. That combination is slower than open country and it is worth pricing honestly rather than optimistically.
Long approaches over rock and across draws mean the driveway is often a bigger job than the pad it leads to. Built properly it needs crown, base to a real depth and a crossing where water already runs. Built badly it washes out the first spring.
The full menu from our excavation and dirt work page, priced and planned for Driftwood ground.
Cut and fill is the whole job on most sites around Driftwood. Material comes off the high side, goes onto the low side, and gets compacted as it goes rather than pushed into place and hoped over. Balancing a site so nothing has to be hauled in or out is the cheapest version of this work, and where the ground allows it we will tell you.
Grading is what separates a site that drains from one that ponds. We shape positive fall away from every structure, tie it into somewhere the water can actually go, and finish to a surface that reads as landform rather than machine tracks. On hays county getting this wrong shows up the first wet season.
A pad is only as good as what is under it. Subgrade gets prepared, fill goes in compacted lifts to a spec, and the finished elevation is set against the drainage plan rather than the existing dirt. Barn pads, shop pads and house pads around Driftwood all get built the same way because the failure mode is the same.
Site prep is where our clearing side and our dirt side meet. Trees down, stumps and root balls out of the building footprint, ground cut to rough grade and handed to a builder ready for survey and permit. Doing both halves with one crew is faster and there is nobody to blame in the middle.
Ranch roads and driveways get built to survive rain, not just to look right on the day. Crown for shedding water, base rock spread and compacted to a real depth, and crossings where the water already wants to run. A road built without those three costs more in the second year than it saved in the first.
Ponds and stock tanks are dirt work with a water problem attached. The dam gets keyed into undisturbed ground and built in compacted lifts, the basin gets cut to depth, and the spillway goes in at the right elevation. Around Driftwood we will tell you honestly whether your ground will hold water before you commit.
Every quote is built from machine days: which machines, how many days, plus transport to your gate. No unit-rate mysteries and no allowances that balloon later. The logic is published across our site, so you can check our arithmetic. A few photos texted to 512-400-2693 get you a same-day range.
Around Driftwood the swing is rock depth and access. Long private drives, tight working room between trees you want kept, and material that usually has to be imported because the site will not balance on its own.
Photos and a rough idea of scope get a same-day range in machine days. If the range works, we put a site walk on the calendar.
Rock gets probed, soil gets read, gates get measured. The whole plan is built standing on your ground, which is why our quotes hold.
The quote lists machines, days, transport, and every contingency by name. Nothing lives in fine print because there is none.
Iron arrives on the lowboy, stages where you point, and works the job continuously to the finish.
The sequence never changes because the physics never change. Fills go in as compacted lifts, grades finish to drain.
You inspect the pads, slopes, and drainage against the plan with us. We load the machines when you are satisfied, not before.
A pond is a dirt job with a water problem attached, and it is the same crew, the same machines and the same compaction standard as a building pad. The difference is that a pad fails slowly and a dam fails all at once.
Everything that matters happens in the dam. It gets keyed in so water cannot slide underneath it, built in compacted lifts rather than pushed up in one pass, and given a bank shallow enough to mow. Ponds almost never fail in the middle. They fail at the dam.
The spillway is the other half. Somewhere for overflow to go that is not across the dam, cut into undisturbed ground at the right elevation.
Around Driftwood that question gets answered with test pits, not optimism. If the ground will not hold water on its own we will say so and price the fix, whether that is a clay core, imported select fill or a sealed basin.
Depth beats width every time. Six feet at center is the baseline we build to, and it is why our pond pricing is quoted that way.
Real projects with full write-ups and photos. Every card opens the project page.
Every number on a dirt job comes back to what is under the surface, and the only honest way to know is to open the ground. We dig test holes on the site walk. It costs an hour and it is the difference between a quote you can rely on and a change order later.
Fill placed in one lift and tracked over looks identical to fill placed in compacted lifts, right up until something is built on it. We build to a spec and we are happy to have it tested. The pads that fail in Texas nearly all failed at this step.
Most dirt work that goes wrong went wrong because of water, not dirt. Where it comes from, where it sits and where it leaves are questions we answer before the first cut around Driftwood, because retrofitting drainage after concrete is the expensive way to learn it.
We clear the trees and we move the dirt, which means the stumps come out of the pad footprint properly instead of being someone else problem. On a site that needs both, that is usually days off the schedule and one less contractor to coordinate.
Great company with equipment to handle any size job!
Reed Brown, Google review
Taylor gets the job done quickly and efficiently.
Sarah Boutwell Johnson, Google review
Taylor is a great owner/operator. I'd recommend him to anyone.
Josh Noslrac, Google review
Priced by the machine day rather than by guesswork. Dozer and excavator work is $3,000 per day plus transport, with a one day minimum on every machine. What sets your number is how much material moves, whether fill has to be imported, and how deep the rock runs and how much material has to be imported. Send photos and we will give you a real figure.
Yes, and it is usually cheaper to have one outfit do both. Trees down, stumps and root balls out of the building footprint, then straight into cut and fill with the same crew. On a site that needs clearing and dirt work, splitting it across two contractors adds days and a blame line in the middle.
Yes. Bring the plan set and we build to it, including compaction spec and finished elevations. If the plan and the ground disagree, which happens in Hays County more than people expect, we will flag it before we start rather than build something that has to be redone.
It gets planned for, not discovered. The site walk includes probing, and the quote carries a written contingency for ripping or hammering, billed by the day. The difference between outfits shows up at the first hard bucket, and ours is in writing.
We build pads in moisture-conditioned compacted lifts to plan elevations. If your engineer requires density testing we build to the spec and support the schedule, and if there is no engineer we build like there was one.
Yes, that is the operation: clearing, grubbing, excavation, grading, and pads under one plan and one invoice. The gaps between contractors are where budgets die, so we removed the gaps.
Photos and a rough scope get a same-day ballpark. A site walk gets a written number in machine days that does not move after you sign.
