Concrete footings in El Monte CA - the soils report and plan settled before anyone digs

You're usually here because something new is going up, like a room, a patio cover, a block wall or a deck post, and it needs something solid underneath. The bad news first. The schedule turns mostly on the reports and the permit, not the pour, so we start those before anything else. The price turns on how many feet of footing you need, how deep and wide the design calls for, how hard the dig is and whether an engineer has to draw it, and your estimate spells all of that out. If the footing is part of a whole new house or addition, it's closer to our foundation installation work.

First, I sit down with you and settle whether the city's standard detail fits your job or an engineer needs to draw the footing. That decides who designs it and what the permit asks for. We get the soils report moving early, since the permit waits on it. Once the permit's in hand, we lay out the footing, dig to the design, clean the loose dirt out of the trench and set the rebar, the steel bars that hold the concrete together when the ground moves. Then we call for the inspection before any concrete goes in. We try to pour outside the hottest part of the day so the top doesn't dry out before it sets. After the pour we leave it to cure, the slow hardening that gives concrete its strength, before anyone builds on it.

Footings often come with other work. When an old patio or driveway sits where the trench has to go, we do the concrete cutting ourselves so the part you keep stays whole. When the real problem is a house that has already settled, that's foundation raising, and we'll tell you if that's the job you need instead.

Here's the hard part first. The City of El Monte wants a soils report from an engineer before it issues a permit for any new footing, no matter how small the structure, and that isn't a step we can skip. The reason is the ground. The city says most of El Monte is mapped as a liquefaction zone, where wet soil can turn loose and soft in a strong quake. The building official can also ask for soils data on any project where the ground calls for it. So we tell you up front, help you line up the engineer and pull the permit once the report is done.

On jobs around here we mostly see older houses getting a room, a patio cover or a new block wall, often with an old slab or tree roots right where the footing has to go. We dig past that to the ground the design calls for, and we run into the same kinds of houses on jobs in South El Monte and Temple City.