Dunnebacke Constructors
Excavation · Demolition · Drainage · Hendersonville, TN
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(615) 887-1194
Dunnebacke Constructors
Excavation · Demolition · Drainage · Hendersonville, TN
A brick porch and front walkway had reached the end of their life — mortar gone, brick loose, moss taking over, and the whole surface pitched wrong. The homeowner had a contractor lined up to build a new porch, and needed the old one gone and the ground ready. We demolished the porch and walkway, hauled every load off site, graded the pad clean, and dug the footers to the contractor's line and depth so his crew could set forms the day they showed up.
This one wasn't a repair job. The brick porch and the walkway running off it had been there a long time, and it showed: mortar joints washed out, brick sitting loose, moss and weeds growing up through the surface, and enough settlement that water was running back toward the house instead of away from it. Patching it would have been money thrown at a surface that was going to keep coming apart underneath.
The homeowner had already made the call to replace it and had a contractor ready to build. What they needed was the part in between — somebody to take the old structure out, get the debris gone, and leave the ground in a condition the new build could start from. That's the work a lot of homeowners don't realize they have to line up separately.
Demolition next to an occupied house is mostly about control. You're working within a few feet of brick veneer, gutters, downspouts, windows, and landscaping the homeowner wants to keep. The excavator does the breaking, but where you put the machine and which direction you pull the material matters more than how hard you hit it.
We broke out the brick porch structure and the walkway with a mini excavator, working away from the house so material fell into the open yard instead of against the veneer. Block, brick, and old mortar came out together and got staged in one pile rather than scattered across the lawn.
Every bit of it left the property. No pile sitting in the side yard for weeks, no "we'll get it next trip." Loading and hauling is the part that makes a demo job actually finished — and it's the part homeowners get stuck with when a demo crew leaves the material behind.
With the structure gone we graded the disturbed area smooth and pulled the finished grade away from the foundation. Getting that fall right now matters — the new porch is going to sit on this ground, and water needs to move away from the house underneath it, not pond against the brick.
We dug the footers for the new porch to the layout and depth the contractor specified — straight walls, clean bottoms, spoil pulled back clear of the trench so his crew had room to work. Footers dug right save the builder a day of hand-cleaning before he can set forms and pour.
Old porch gone, walkway gone, debris off the property, grade pulled away from the foundation, and footers open and ready. The contractor showed up to a site he could work — not one he had to clean up first. That handoff is the whole point of hiring the excavation out to somebody who does it every day.
A good portion of what we do is the dirt work behind somebody else's build. Builders, remodelers, deck and porch contractors, and concrete crews call us for the part that needs a machine and an operator: demolition and haul-off, footer and foundation excavation, pad prep, backfill, and final grade. You give us the layout and the depth, we give you a hole you can pour in.
We're set up for residential-scale work in tight spots — between houses, around landscaping, close to existing structures — which is exactly where a full-size machine and a careless operator cause expensive problems.
Grading around a new structure is also where drainage problems get built in or designed out. If water has been standing or running the wrong way on your property, see our erosion control work in Hendersonville and the riprap drainage channel project — same crew, same machines, same approach.
Old concrete, brick porches and stoops, patios, sidewalks, slabs, retaining walls, sheds, fence lines, stumps and brush — if it needs to come out and go away, that's a call we take all the time. We handle the demolition, the loading, and the haul-off, and we can leave the site graded or dug to whatever your next step requires.
We serve Hendersonville, Gallatin, Goodlettsville, Millersville, Mount Juliet, Lebanon, and throughout Middle Tennessee.
Demolition, haul-off, footers, and grading — free estimates, straight quotes.