Foundations and retaining walls are where the engineering rubber meets the soil. Get them right and the house above them ages gracefully. Get them wrong and the homeowner spends decades chasing cracks. Most of the foundation work we see in Davis and Weber counties falls into a few specific buckets, and the right answer depends a lot on which one you're in.
Wasatch Front soils, in plain English
Soils across the Wasatch Front fall into a few rough categories that matter for foundation design:
- Bench expansive clay. Up against the foothills from Bountiful to North Ogden, you'll find clay-heavy soils that swell when they get wet and shrink when they dry. These are the soils that give Utah its reputation for stair-step basement wall cracks and seasonal door-sticking. Foundation design has to account for the expansion pressure.
- Lake Bonneville sediment. Most of the Davis and Weber valley sits on old lake-bottom sediment — generally well-behaved silts and sands, but with pockets of soft material and occasional shallow groundwater. Bearing capacities are usually fine but layer variability matters.
- Hooper / West Point alluvial. Out on the west side of Davis County, the soils are a mix of alluvial deposits with localized soft pockets. Most homes do fine on conventional spread footings, but the soft pockets are real and a soils report is wise on bigger jobs.
- Uphill granular fill. A lot of the newer subdivisions in Syracuse, Layton, and Kaysville sit on cut-and- fill lots where the building pad is engineered fill. These are usually well-controlled, but the design has to know it's on fill, not native soil.
The most common foundation jobs we take
Foundation evaluations
A homeowner sees a crack and panics. We come out, look at it, and tell them straight what we're looking at. Most of the time it's nothing — the cracks are old, stable, and cosmetic. When it's not nothing, we document it carefully and design a fix that's appropriate to the actual problem, not the worst-case sales pitch a foundation repair company quoted them. We charge a flat fee for the visit, write a short report, and you decide what to do next.
Repair plans
When a foundation actually needs work, we design the repair. That might be helical piers, push piers, wall anchors, carbon fiber straps, underpinning, or drainage and grading improvements. We pick the right tool for the actual problem. The deliverable is a stamped plan and specification your contractor can build to, which both protects you and makes the scope crystal clear so you can compare bids honestly.
New foundation design
For additions, ADUs, garages, shops, and small commercial buildings, we design the footing, stem wall, and anchor system from scratch. We work to your local frost depth, snow load, and seismic site class.
Retaining wall design
The most common retaining wall job in northern Utah is a hillside lot in Kaysville, Bountiful, or Eden where the homeowner needs a wall higher than 4 feet, or a wall with a driveway above it. Anything in those categories needs engineering. We design cantilever walls, gravity walls, segmental retaining walls, and (when it makes sense) mechanically stabilized earth walls. The deliverable includes wall reinforcement, footing dimensions, drainage, and the connection details your contractor needs.
Bowing basement walls
Older basements (1960s–1980s) on the Wasatch bench sometimes develop horizontal cracking and inward bowing as expansive clay pushes against them through years of moisture cycling. We evaluate severity, design the right repair (carbon fiber, steel I-beam bracing, or full reconstruction depending on deflection), and write the plan.
The 4-foot rule, explained
The most-asked question we get on retaining walls: "Do I need an engineer?" The shorthand answer is the 4-foot rule — if the wall is over 4 feet tall, measured from the bottom of the footing to the top of the wall, almost every Utah jurisdiction requires engineered plans. But there are catches:
- Surcharge changes the rules. A 3-foot wall retaining a driveway above it needs an engineer. A 3-foot wall holding a sloped lawn might not.
- Tiered walls usually need an engineer. Two 3-foot walls stacked aren't actually two 3-foot walls — the lower wall sees the surcharge from the upper, and the engineering has to reflect that.
- Some cities are stricter. A few Davis County jurisdictions require engineering down to 3 feet. Always worth a call to your building department.
For the deeper dive, see our blog post — The 4-Foot Rule: When Your Retaining Wall Needs an Engineer in Utah.
How a foundation project usually starts
Send us photos of what you're seeing or building, your address, and a sentence or two about the situation. We come back the same day with a fee, a timeline, and an honest read on whether you need a site visit, a repair plan, or just a phone call to be reassured. We don't drum up work that isn't there.