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Most Clifton Heights homeowners don’t call about excavation until something is already wrong. Water pooling in the rear yard after every rain. A basement that smells like it shouldn’t. A retaining wall that’s leaning a little more each spring. These aren’t cosmetic issues they’re symptoms of grading that was never right or hasn’t held up over 60-plus years of settling.
Getting the grade right changes all of that. When water moves away from your foundation instead of toward it, you stop fighting the same battle every wet season. Clifton Heights sits on the western edge of the Darby Creek watershed a system the Delaware County Conservation District has flagged for chronic flooding tied to over-development and failed stormwater controls. That context matters when we’re planning your project, because grading in this borough isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about managing water in a place that already has more of it than it can handle.
The other thing that changes when excavation and grading are done correctly is what becomes possible. A rear yard that drained poorly for years can become a functional outdoor space a patio, a retaining wall, a finished area you actually use. That’s not a separate project. With us, it’s the same one.
We’re based in Aston, PA right in the heart of Delaware County and have been working throughout the county for over 15 years. That includes Clifton Heights and the surrounding communities with the same clay-heavy soils, aging rowhouse stock, and tight rear yards. This isn’t a regional company that added Delaware County to a service area map. We’re a contractor that’s been doing this work here long enough to know what the ground does, how the drainage behaves, and what Clifton Heights’s permit process actually requires.
Renato Spennato is owner-operated and personally involved in projects. Reviewers on BuildZoom verified Delaware County homeowners describe us as “always on time or early” and call the experience “arguably the best contractor experience I have had as a homeowner.” We hold a PA contractor license, carry full insurance, and rank in the top 11% of more than 125,000 licensed contractors statewide. Those aren’t marketing claims they’re independently verifiable facts you can check before you ever make a call.
It starts with a site assessment. Before any equipment is on your property, we look at what you’re working with existing grade, drainage patterns, access constraints, and what the finished project needs to accomplish. In Clifton Heights, that assessment almost always includes a drainage conversation, because the lot sizes here are small and the margin for error is narrow. A grade that’s off by a couple of inches on a one-twentieth-acre lot can send water exactly where you don’t want it.
From there, we handle permitting. Clifton Heights has a dedicated Grading and Excavation Ordinance Chapter 178 that requires a permit, mandates a drainage plan reviewed by the Borough Engineer, and holds the contractor responsible for protecting adjoining properties. In a borough of attached rowhouses, where your excavation project is literally adjacent to your neighbor’s foundation, this matters. We provide the required certificate of insurance and PA license documentation and make sure the work is fully compliant before anything starts.
The excavation and grading itself is done with equipment and methods suited to tight residential lots not the kind of open-site approach that works in a large suburban yard but creates problems in a dense borough like Clifton Heights. Once the grade is set and drainage is confirmed, if your project continues into a patio, retaining wall, or finished outdoor space, the same team handles it. No handoff to a separate contractor. No gaps between trades.
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We handle residential excavation and site preparation for homeowners across Clifton Heights and the surrounding Delaware County area including rear yard regrading, drainage correction, land clearing, foundation excavation, retaining wall base preparation, and full site prep before patio or hardscape installation. Every project starts with the ground and works up from there.
What makes this different from hiring an excavation-only contractor is that we can take the project all the way through. The competitors you’ll find in Delaware County excavation searches companies like Scavo Solutions or J.L. Latsios handle the dig or the paving. They don’t do the finished outdoor living work. That means if you want a usable backyard on the other side of your grading project, you’re managing two separate contractors, two separate schedules, and two separate points of accountability. With us, it’s one contract, one crew, one person responsible for the outcome.
For Clifton Heights specifically, that matters because the most common projects here aren’t simple. They involve aging drainage infrastructure, tight access, shared property lines, and a borough code that requires real documentation before work begins. We’re familiar with all of it the clay soils, the stormwater dynamics tied to the Darby Creek watershed, and the Chapter 178 permit requirements that apply to every grading and excavation project in the borough.
Yes Clifton Heights has a dedicated Grading and Excavation Ordinance (Chapter 178) that requires a permit for grading and excavation work. Before any permit is issued, the Borough Engineer must review and approve a drainage plan showing that your proposed grade changes won’t cause water damage to neighboring properties. In a borough of attached rowhouses where your rear yard shares a line with your neighbor’s, this isn’t a formality it’s a real protection for everyone involved.
Contractors applying for permits in Clifton Heights must provide a certificate of insurance and a valid PA state license number. If you hire a contractor who skips the permit process or can’t document their credentials, you’re taking on that liability yourself. We carry full insurance, hold a current PA contractor license, and handle the permit process as part of every project so you’re not left figuring out what the code requires or chasing paperwork on your own.
Residential excavation costs vary depending on the scope of work, but nationally the average runs around $3,975, with a typical range of $1,658 to $6,709 for most projects. Backyard grading specifically tends to fall between $1,000 and $5,000. In the Philadelphia area including Delaware County labor rates run roughly 15 to 25 percent higher than rural Pennsylvania, so it’s reasonable to expect your project to land toward the middle or upper end of those ranges depending on complexity.
For Clifton Heights homeowners, the scope of work often includes more than just moving dirt. Tight lot access, clay-heavy soils that don’t drain the way sandy soils do, and the need for proper drainage engineering to meet Chapter 178 requirements can all affect the final cost. The most useful thing you can do is get a written estimate that breaks down exactly what’s included not a ballpark number over the phone. We provide clear, itemized estimates with no surprise additions, which matters when you’re working with a defined budget.
The most common cause in Clifton Heights is grade that either never sloped correctly away from the foundation or has settled and flattened over decades of use. Most of the housing stock here was built between the 1920s and 1960s that’s 60 to 100 years of soil movement, root growth, and drainage infrastructure aging in place. When the original grade breaks down, water has nowhere to go except toward your foundation or into a pool in the center of the yard.
The Darby Creek watershed context makes this worse. Clifton Heights sits right on the creek, and the Delaware County Conservation District has documented this watershed as chronically prone to flooding tied to over-development and inadequate stormwater controls. That means during heavy rain events, your yard isn’t just dealing with what falls on your property it’s dealing with runoff from the surrounding dense, paved borough. Correcting the grade, improving drainage slope, and in some cases adding drainage infrastructure are the real fixes. A rain garden can help at the margins, but if the underlying grade is wrong, no surface-level solution holds for long.
For a standard rear yard grading project on a Clifton Heights rowhouse lot, the physical work typically takes one to three days once permits are in place and the project is scheduled. The permit process through the Clifton Heights Department of Code Enforcement adds time upfront plan for that review period before work can begin, especially if the Borough Engineer needs to sign off on the drainage plan.
Timing also matters seasonally. Spring is the busiest period for excavation and grading in Delaware County post-winter thaw reveals drainage failures and demand spikes quickly. If you’re dealing with a drainage problem and want it corrected before another wet season, getting on the schedule in late winter or early fall gives you the best chance of a timely start. Summer is peak season for outdoor living projects, so if your grading work is the foundation for a patio or retaining wall, earlier scheduling translates directly to earlier enjoyment of the finished space.
It can and Clifton Heights’s own ordinance addresses this directly. Chapter 178 states that no person shall excavate or regrade land so close to a property line as to endanger adjoining property without supporting and protecting it from settling, cracking, erosion, or sediment damage. In a borough where homes share walls and property lines are measured in feet rather than yards, this is a real concern, not a theoretical one.
The way you protect yourself and your neighbor is by hiring a contractor who is properly licensed, fully insured, and familiar with how to work in constrained residential environments. An experienced operator uses the right equipment for tight spaces, plans the excavation sequence to minimize lateral pressure on adjacent soil, and documents the condition of neighboring structures before work begins. We’ve been doing this kind of close-quarters residential work in Delaware County for over 15 years. The credentials are verifiable, the insurance is current, and the approach is built around getting it right the first time not fixing problems after the fact.
Yes and for most Clifton Heights homeowners, that’s actually the more practical way to approach it. Excavation and grading aren’t the end goal; they’re the foundation for whatever you’re building on top. If you’re planning a patio, a retaining wall along a narrow lot line, or a finished outdoor space in a rear yard that currently drains poorly, separating the excavation from the hardscape work means managing two contractors, two timelines, and two sets of decisions about how the grade should be set.
When one team handles the full scope from initial dig through finished surface the grade is set with the final project in mind from day one. The drainage slope, the base depth, the compaction all of it is planned around what’s going up on top of it. That’s how you avoid the common problem of a patio that heaves after the first winter because the base wasn’t right, or a retaining wall that fails because the drainage behind it wasn’t accounted for during excavation. We handle both ends of that project, which is something no excavation-only competitor in the Delaware County market can offer.
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