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If your yard pools after every rain, your basement takes on water, or a slope in your backyard has been slowly losing ground for years that’s not just a landscape issue. In Broomall, it’s a clay soil issue. The ground here holds water instead of shedding it, and when the grade isn’t set up correctly from the start, that water has nowhere to go except toward your foundation.
Proper excavation and grading changes that. Water moves away from your home the way it’s supposed to. Slopes stay stable. The outdoor space you’ve been planning whether that’s a patio, a retaining wall, or just a usable backyard actually has a solid foundation under it instead of a drainage problem waiting to get worse.
The other thing that changes is the project itself. A lot of Broomall homeowners have dealt with the frustration of hiring an excavation crew, getting a dug-up yard, and then having to coordinate three other contractors to finish what should have been one job. When we handle excavation, grading, retaining walls, and hardscape all under one team, the outcome is more consistent and the process is a lot less painful.
We’re based in Aston, PA right here in Delaware County and have been doing excavation, grading, and outdoor construction work throughout the county for years. Renato Spennato runs the company personally, and his name shows up in nearly every review because he’s actually on the job, not just answering the phone.
The work we do in Broomall reflects what we know about this specific area. The 1950s and 60s split-levels in Lawrence Park weren’t built with today’s drainage standards in mind. Soil throughout Broomall and the surrounding townships is clay-heavy, grades shift over decades, and Marple Township has its own grading permit requirements under Chapter 159 that a lot of contractors either don’t know about or don’t bother with. We do.
Our BuildZoom score of 102 puts us in the top 11% of more than 125,000 licensed Pennsylvania contractors. You can verify that independently. We’re not asking you to take our word for it.
Every excavation project in Broomall starts with an assessment not a sales pitch. Before anything gets dug, we look at your existing drainage patterns, the current grade, soil conditions, and what you’re ultimately trying to build or fix. In clay-heavy soil like you find throughout Marple Township, skipping this step is exactly how drainage problems get created instead of solved.
Once we understand what’s there, we pull the necessary permits through Marple Township’s Code Enforcement Department. That includes grading permits under Chapter 159 and, where required, stormwater management compliance under Chapter 257. Marple Township also requires contractors to provide a Certificate of Insurance with the township listed as Certificate Holder something we handle as a standard part of every project. Before any digging begins, we also call 811 as required by Pennsylvania law to mark utilities. You don’t have to chase any of that down yourself.
From there, the work follows a clear sequence: excavation, grading, drainage installation if needed, and then whatever comes next whether that’s a retaining wall, a patio foundation, or a finished outdoor living space. Because we handle all of it in-house, there’s no handoff to another crew and no gap between the excavation phase and the finished result.
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Excavation and site preparation in Broomall covers more than just moving dirt. Depending on what you’re working with, that can mean grading a yard that’s been draining toward your foundation for twenty years, excavating for a new patio or retaining wall, clearing and leveling a slope that’s started to erode, or preparing a site for an addition. We handle all of it and because we’re a full-service masonry and outdoor construction company, the excavation work is designed around the finished project from day one.
For Broomall homeowners specifically, drainage is almost always part of the conversation. Clay soil throughout this part of Delaware County doesn’t give water anywhere to go on its own. That means proper base preparation, correct slope, and in many cases drainage tile installation are built into the scope not added as an afterthought when something goes wrong later.
We also work carefully around what’s already on your property. Broomall’s established neighborhoods are full of mature trees, existing landscaping, and decades of improvements that took time and money. Our crews plan around what you want to keep, and we’re upfront about what the process looks like before equipment ever arrives on site.
Yes and it’s worth understanding before you hire anyone. Marple Township has a standalone ordinance, Chapter 159: Grading, Drainage and Erosion Control, that requires permits specifically for grading work. This is separate from a standard building permit, and it’s actively enforced by the township’s Code Enforcement Department at 227 S. Sproul Road.
On top of that, Marple Township requires all contractors to provide a Certificate of Insurance with the township listed as the Certificate Holder before work begins. That’s a specific local requirement that not every contractor knows about or comes prepared for. If your contractor isn’t familiar with Marple Township’s permitting process, that gap can slow your project down or create compliance issues that affect you at resale. We handle all of this as a standard part of every excavation job in Broomall permits, COI, and the 811 utility marking call required by Pennsylvania law before any digging starts.
Excavation costs in the Philadelphia area generally range from around $1,600 to $6,700 for residential projects, with most jobs landing somewhere in the $3,500 to $4,500 range depending on scope. In Broomall specifically, a few factors tend to push costs toward the higher end of that range. Clay soil is harder to work with than sandy or loamy soil it’s denser, heavier, and requires more careful handling to avoid creating new drainage problems in the process of fixing old ones.
The size of the project, the complexity of the existing grade, whether drainage tile or stormwater management infrastructure needs to be installed, and how much material needs to be hauled off all affect the final number. Marple Township permit fees are an additional line item. The most accurate way to get a real number for your specific property is a site visit conditions vary enough in Broomall’s established neighborhoods that ballpark estimates over the phone aren’t particularly useful.
The most common reason is clay soil combined with a grade that’s either flat or sloping toward your home instead of away from it. Clay doesn’t drain freely it holds water near the surface, and when the ground is saturated, that water has to go somewhere. If the grade isn’t directing it away from your foundation and off your property, it pools in low spots, saturates the soil around your home, and eventually finds its way into your basement.
This is a widespread issue in Broomall’s older neighborhoods, particularly in areas like Lawrence Park where the housing stock dates to the 1950s and 60s. Those homes were built before current stormwater management standards, and decades of soil settling have shifted grades in ways that weren’t a problem initially but have gotten progressively worse. The fix is usually a combination of regrading, proper drainage installation, and in some cases a French drain or drainage tile system to move water away from the foundation. Getting the grade right is the foundation of everything else.
Spring and fall are generally the best windows for excavation and grading in Broomall. Spring roughly March through May is the highest-demand period because homeowners want projects finished before summer. If you’re planning a patio, retaining wall, or any outdoor living project, spring excavation lines up with that timeline. The trade-off is that spring scheduling fills up fast, especially for contractors who handle the full project from excavation through finished hardscape.
Fall is often the smarter choice if your timeline is flexible. The ground is workable, temperatures are moderate, and any grading or drainage work completed in fall has time to settle before the freeze-thaw cycles hit in winter. Speaking of which Delaware County sits in USDA Zone 7a, which means regular freeze-thaw cycles throughout winter and early spring. Clay soil is particularly affected by this: it expands when frozen and contracts when it thaws, which is hard on improperly prepared surfaces and retaining walls. Doing the work in fall with proper base preparation gives everything time to stabilize before winter puts it to the test.
Yes, and that’s actually one of the main reasons Broomall homeowners call us instead of a dig-only excavation company. Most excavation contractors in this area handle the site preparation and then hand you off which means you’re coordinating a separate masonry crew, managing two different timelines, and hoping the drainage approach from the excavation phase lines up with what the hardscape crew needs. It usually doesn’t go as smoothly as it sounds.
We handle excavation, grading, retaining walls, patios, walkways, and outdoor kitchens as one connected scope of work. The same team that grades your yard builds your patio. That continuity matters for drainage, for base preparation, and for making sure the finished project actually performs the way it’s supposed to over time. If you’re a Broomall homeowner who’s been planning an outdoor living project not just a grading repair this is the approach that gets you from a torn-up yard to a finished space without the coordination headache in between.
The most straightforward way is to check BuildZoom, which pulls from Pennsylvania’s contractor licensing database and shows a contractor’s license status, permit history, and score. You can search any contractor by name and verify their standing independently no need to take anyone’s word for it. We hold a BuildZoom score of 102, which puts us in the top 11% of more than 125,000 licensed PA contractors. That’s a publicly verifiable number.
Beyond the license itself, Marple Township has a specific insurance requirement: contractors must provide a Certificate of Insurance with Marple Township listed as the Certificate Holder before work begins on any permitted project in Broomall. If a contractor you’re considering can’t produce that or isn’t familiar with the requirement, that’s a meaningful signal about how they handle compliance generally. It’s worth asking directly before signing anything. An unlicensed or underinsured contractor working on a permitted grading project in Marple Township creates liability that follows you not them if something goes wrong.
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