Site leveling and backfill for seven villas in Bo Put

We already knew this plot: a month earlier we had cleared it of overgrowth for the same client. Back then the job was to strip everything away and see what was actually under the scrub. Now the next stage was starting - 7 villas are going up on this land, and the site had to be brought to design levels.

The ground we inherited was uneven: on one side it rose noticeably, on the other it dropped away. A difference like that doesn't work for building - you cut in some places, fill in others, and bring the whole thing into one plane.

Why hiring a single excavator made no sense

The client was in a hurry and arrived with a solution already in mind: rent an excavator for a couple of weeks and be done with it. We suggested working the numbers together first.

On a job this size, an excavator working alone spends less time digging than it does shuffling material. It cuts the soil, swings round, carries the bucket a few metres, tips it, comes back - and repeats that loop until the earth has crawled from one end of the plot to the other. Every one of those movements is billed by the hour, and very little of it is actual productive work.

So we proposed something else: three machines as one crew. The excavator does nothing but dig. The dump truck takes the soil and drives it straight to where it's needed - even to the far corner of the site. The tractor follows behind and grades it out. Nobody waits for anybody, and every machine has one clear job.

The numbers came out like this: three machines for three days was cheaper than one excavator for two weeks. On timing the difference was even starker - the client had a finished site almost immediately instead of half a month later.

How the work went

A 7-tonne Yanmar ViO70, a six-wheel Hino 300 dump truck and a Kubota L3608 tractor went out to the site.

We started on the high ground: stripped off the excess soil and at the same time formed a clean slope along the boundary, so the earth wouldn't creep towards the neighbours over time. Nothing we cut was thrown away - that same soil went straight into the low areas.

From there the work became a loop with almost no pauses. The excavator loads, the truck carries and tips at the right spot, the tractor spreads and compacts in layers. Across three days the machines were barely ever standing still.

We paid particular attention to the falls. A perfectly flat pad is a bad idea on Koh Samui: come the rainy season, the water simply sits on the plot. The final grading was done with gentle slopes so the water drains away on its own.

Result

Three days - and instead of uneven, broken ground there was a level pad at design height, ready for setting out and for the villa excavations. The client walked the site, everything matched what we had agreed, and he invited us to his next project in Ban Po almost straight away.

Need a plot leveled for construction on Koh Samui? Get in touch - we'll look at the volume and put together a combination of machines that doesn't have you paying for hire days you don't need.