House Pad Construction Done Right the First Time
Compacted, properly graded building pads that keep your slab high, dry, and level.
A house is only as good as what it sits on. If the pad under your slab wasn't built in compacted lifts with the right dirt, you'll find out the hard way — cracked slabs, doors that won't shut, water under the foundation. House pad construction is a job where cut corners don't show up until they're expensive.
Houston County Mulching and Land Services builds house pads, barn pads, and shop pads across East Texas out of Crockett. We handle the cut and fill, haul in select fill when the native dirt won't do, and compact everything in lifts. When your engineer or builder hands us a spec sheet, we build to it.
Whether it's a new home, a metal building, or a barn on the back forty, the pad is where it starts. Call (936) 852-4047 for a free estimate.
What's included
- ✓Cut and Fill Grading. We move dirt from the high side to the low side to get your building site level, keeping haul-off and haul-in to what the job actually needs.
- ✓Select Fill Hauling. East Texas topsoil is usually too sandy or too organic to build on. We bring in select fill — the sandy-clay mix builders want under a slab — when the site calls for it.
- ✓Compaction in Lifts. Fill gets placed in layers and compacted one lift at a time. Dumping four feet of loose dirt and driving over it once is how pads fail. We don't do that.
- ✓Elevation Above Grade. We build pads up above the surrounding ground so rainwater runs away from your slab instead of under it.
- ✓Building to Engineered Specs. Got a soils report or engineered foundation plan? Hand it over. We build the pad to match what the engineer drew.
How the job goes
- Site Walk and Estimate. We meet you on the property, look at the lay of the land, talk about where the building goes, and get you a free estimate.
- Clearing and Stripping. Trees, brush, stumps, and the organic topsoil layer come off first. You can't build a pad on roots and leaf litter.
- Cut, Fill, and Compact. We shape the subgrade, then build the pad up in compacted lifts of select fill until it hits the elevation your plans call for.
- Final Grade and Handoff. The pad gets bladed smooth and checked for level and elevation, ready for your foundation crew to form up and pour.
Why it matters in East Texas
Dirt around here isn't simple. Most of Houston County runs sandy loam on top with red clay underneath, and that clay swells when it's wet and shrinks when it's dry. That movement is exactly what cracks slabs. A pad built with the wrong dirt, or the right dirt compacted wrong, moves with the seasons — and your foundation moves with it.
Then there's the rain. East Texas gets gully-washer storms in spring that dump inches in an afternoon. A pad sitting flush with the surrounding grade turns into an island in a puddle. We build pads tall enough that water has somewhere to go besides under your house.
We've seen pads around Crockett, Grapeland, and Lovelady thrown up cheap — loose fill pushed into a pile and bladed flat. They look fine the day the check clears. Two wet seasons later the slab's cracked and the repair costs ten times what a proper pad would have. Do it once, do it right.
Common questions
Yes, and that's how we prefer to work. If your foundation engineer or builder has a plan that calls out pad elevation, dimensions, select fill, or compaction, we build to that sheet of paper. If the project requires compaction testing, we coordinate with your builder and the testing lab so the pad passes before anybody forms a slab. And if you don't have engineered plans — say it's a barn or shop — we build the pad the way good builders around here expect it: stripped, filled with the right material, compacted in lifts.
It depends on your lot, but around East Texas most builders want the top of the pad a foot or more above natural grade, and more than that in flat or low-lying spots. The point isn't the number — it's making sure water drains away from the slab in every direction, even in a hard spring rain. When we walk your site we look at where water comes from and where it wants to go, and set the pad height so your foundation stays high and dry.
Related work we handle: Land Clearing · Driveways · Drainage Solutions & Land Grading