Concrete footings in Duluth MN - set below the frost line and ready for inspection

Most people call us when they're planning a new deck, a porch or a small addition, or when an old post has started to lean after a few winters. The price mostly comes down to how many footings you need, how deep they go, how easy it is to get a digger to the spot and whether the design is a standard frost footing or something an engineer has to work out. The schedule turns on when the inspector can come out and on the season, because a winter pour takes extra steps. I'll go over all of it at the estimate, so you know what you're paying for before we dig.

Footings are the part you can't fix later, so we start with the hole. I come out first and ask the questions, like what the footing will carry and where the water runs on your lot, then our crew lays out each footing and digs to the depth your site calls for. We shape the bottom, keep the hole dry, and set the form and the rebar, which is the steel that holds the concrete together when the ground pushes on it. Then we set the pour around the inspector's visit so nothing gets covered before it's checked, and we let the concrete cure, the wait it needs to gain strength, before anything bears on it. If the budget gets tight, depth is the last place I'd cut, because a nice deck on a shallow footing can heave no matter how good it looks.

Footings are often part of a bigger fix. If the footings under an older porch or addition have settled, foundation raising can sometimes bring the structure back up, and when an old slab or walk sits right where a new footing has to go, we use concrete cutting to open a clean hole through it instead of breaking up more than we need to.

In Duluth, the city requires a building permit for work on a building's structure, foundation included, and on deck jobs it inspects the footings before any concrete goes in. The inspector looks at each hole's width and depth, a flat bottom that's belled out wider at the base, and no standing water, and wants the form and steel in place with the post bases and anchor bolts on site. When a job needs a permit, we pull it and book the inspections, and if you'd rather apply yourself, I'll tell you what the city will want to see from us.

We're based in Duluth and work in the cities around it, where most footing calls are for decks, porches and small additions on houses that have seen a lot of winters. Hermantown sits in the same county, so the same state frost depth applies, but across the bridge in Superior you're in Wisconsin, so we check that city's rules instead of carrying Duluth's over.