Foundation installation in Fargo ND - the right depth and height for your lot

You've got a lot and a house plan, and now you need to know what goes under it and when. The price moves mostly with the size of the house, how deep the basement goes and how high your lot says the house has to sit, while the schedule turns on the city's permit and the inspections along the way. Your estimate comes with the scope in writing, so you see what's included before you decide anything. If you're building without a basement, that's slab foundation building, and we do that too.

I start by finding out the lot's flood status, because that decides how deep the basement can go and how high the house has to sit, and everything after it follows from that answer. Then our crew digs out to the planned depth, and we form and pour the footings, the wide concrete base the walls rest on, followed by the walls, with rebar inside, the steel bars that help the concrete hold together when the ground pushes on it. Drainage along the footing and the wall is part of how we bid every foundation, and it's spelled out in the quote. The usual advice for soil like ours is a drain pipe bedded in gravel along the footing plus a drainage layer on the outside of the wall, both aimed at keeping the soil around the house at a steady moisture, so when you compare bids, check that each one covers both.

Footings are their own job too, so if you need them for an addition or a garage, our concrete footings page covers that work. Builders and property owners who call us for foundations often need the rest of the site finished, and we handle concrete parking lot building for those lots.

In Fargo, the lot's flood status is the rule that changes the foundation most. If the house sits in the FEMA 100-year floodplain, or on ground taken out of it by bringing in fill, it has to meet the city's floodproofing standards, and every other house has to be built 2.5 feet above the curb next to the property. For a basement, the city also wants a current basement floodproofing certificate signed by a North Dakota registered professional engineer before it issues the permit, so that's on our list before anything else gets scheduled. We check with the city what your lot needs before we bid, which is why the depth and height in our quote match the rules for your address.

The ground matters too. Fargo and West Fargo sit on the old bed of glacial Lake Agassiz, with silty clays and soft clays that swell when they get wet and shrink as they dry, so we treat drainage and steady soil moisture as part of the foundation, not an add-on. We're based in Fargo and build on the same clay in West Fargo, and we take foundation jobs across the river in Moorhead and the cities around them, checking each city's rules the same way.