Denver Footings and Piers

Two bids for the same porch footings can be far apart and both can be honest. One priced a hole to a number on a plan. The other priced a hole to whatever depth it takes to land on soil that will hold. Those are different products with the same name, and the second one is the only one that ends the problem.

We do bearing work across Denver: new footings under additions in Berkeley, pier repairs under sagging porches in University Hills, pads and caps for covered patios and shop structures up in the Highlands. This page is about where the money in that work actually sits, because homeowners deserve to know which line items are real and which ones are somebody guessing.

Depth is the price, and depth isn't optional

Every bearing dig has two floors it has to get past. One is frost. Concrete resting above the freeze line gets picked up by ice in the soil and set back down slightly wrong, winter after winter, until the thing on top of it is visibly out of line. The other is competent material, which is whatever layer will carry the load without squashing or swelling. Sometimes those two depths are close together. Sometimes we clear frost easily and keep going, because what came out of the hole at four feet was not something anybody should build on.

That's why we won't quote a hole by the each without seeing the site. We can tell you the design depth and what the neighborhood has handed us before. What we won't do is stop at the tape measure when the bucket brings up material that says otherwise.

Where the money goes on a pier job

Concrete is rarely the expensive part. Labor, machine time, and haul off are. A pier that takes twenty minutes to drill on an open lot takes an afternoon when it has to be hand dug between a gas line and a mature tree, and every yard of spoil that comes out of a small backyard has to travel out through a gate in a wheelbarrow. Access is the single biggest swing on residential bearing work in this city, and older blocks with no alley access are where it swings hardest.

Spacing is the other lever, and it's the one worth understanding before you shop bids. Piers get spaced by the load the beam above delivers and by what the soil takes per pier. Widening the spacing to save two holes means every remaining pier carries more, so you get bigger diameter, deeper bells, or both. Sometimes that trade pencils. Usually it doesn't, and a bid with suspiciously few supports is a different design nobody explained to you.

What actually moves the number

The value case, told plainly

Bearing work is the least satisfying money a homeowner spends. Nothing looks better afterward. The porch just stops moving. That's exactly why it gets underbought and revisited: somebody caulks the crack, shims the post, and pays three times over five years for a problem that was always underground.

Here's how we frame it. A correct pier is a one time purchase for the life of the structure above it. A shallow one is a subscription. When we look at a sunken stoop in University Hills or a porch column leaning in Berkeley, the first question we answer is whether the structure on top is still worth supporting. If the framing is shot, we'll say so instead of taking money to hold up something that's finished.

What our bearing work includes, every time

• Utility locates called and marked before a single hole opens
• Hand digging anywhere near irrigation, gas service, or mature roots
• Bearing checked at the bottom of each hole rather than assumed off the plan
• Sizing and spacing signed off by our own structural engineer
• Steel tied into pads, caps, and piers, not dropped in after the pour starts
• Post bases and uplift hardware matched to the actual connection above
• Backfill in compacted lifts, spoil hauled, ground raked back before we leave