New Construction Stump Removal in Ashland City and Cheatham County
On a lot anywhere near the Cumberland, Marks Creek or Sycamore Creek, the hole and the spoil pile are both regulated material. That changes the order of the work, not just the price.
The Panel Date on the Lot Decides the Paperwork
Two sets of FIRM panels govern ground in this county, effective December 22, 2016 and February 26, 2021, and the county's flood rules hang off whichever one covers your parcel. The point a builder needs is that the regulatory definition of development is far broader than a building. Filling, grading, dredging and other work capable of increasing flood damage or erosion all sit inside it, and all of it wants a permit in a mapped flood hazard area.
On a site that reaches past the house pad. It reaches the spoil stockpile, the temporary ramp of dirt pushed up to get a machine to the back of the lot, and the material trucked in to close a crater once a tree is out.
The habit worth building is to establish the zone while the site work is being planned rather than while it is happening, because it changes the sequence. On a mapped parcel the stumps want to be out and gone before any fill is placed, not dug back out later through material somebody has already paid to import and compact.
Inside the Floodway, Nothing Goes In Without a No-Rise
The floodway is the channel plus the strip of fringe that has to stay clear for a flood to get past. The county's regulations are blunt about it: encroachments are prohibited, including earthen fill, new construction, substantial improvements and other development within the adopted regulatory floodway, unless a registered engineer certifies through a no-rise analysis that the work will not raise the base flood elevation.
For stump work on a floodway parcel that reverses the normal method. Ordinarily you grind, backfill the void with spoil and soil, and walk away. There you take material off the site and add none: grind, load, haul, and let the surrounding settled soil bring the grade back rather than importing fill to do it.
It is also the reason those stumps should be dealt with early, while the engineer is still on the job, instead of turning up as a landscaping afterthought once the certificate of occupancy is in hand.
Grindings Are Not Structural Backfill
A compaction test does not care how good the chips look. Stump spoil is wood, air and topsoil. It cannot be compacted to any meaningful density, and it loses forty to fifty percent of its volume as it decomposes. Put it under a driveway, a garage slab, a patio or a footing and the settlement shows up in year three, comfortably after closing and comfortably inside the warranty period.
Anywhere a load is going on top, the wood has to leave rather than be lowered. That means excavating the stump and the main laterals out whole, exporting them off site, and backfilling with clean structural fill placed in lifts and compacted to whatever the geotechnical report or the plan calls for. Grinding is a method for landscape areas, not for bearing ones.
On the same lot we are glad to grind to fourteen or eighteen inches wherever grass or beds are going. We will tell a builder plainly which parts of a pad belong to which method, and put it on the quote that way.
The Stumps Already Buried in the Fill
North of town, where the phases along the Pleasant View line were graded between 2014 and 2020, plenty of stumps never actually left. They were pushed into the fill along with broken block and creek rock during the grading passes. Five or ten years on, that surfaces as a dished area three to six feet across in an otherwise level lawn, a ring of mushrooms in September, or a probe rod that goes eight inches down and stops on something solid.
That is not grinding in the ordinary sense. It is a small excavation: open it up, find out whether you have a stump, a slab offcut or a pocket of construction spoil, take out whatever is in there and rebuild the profile with soil instead of with what came out of it.
On an active site the other half of the problem is housekeeping. The town's construction site maintenance ordinance is the reason our spoil leaves with us rather than joining the pile at the road frontage.
What we settle with a builder before the machine comes off the trailer
- Which flood zone the parcel is in, and whether any of the work falls inside the floodway
- Whether each area is going under a load or under grass, which decides grind against excavate
- The finished grade elevation, so the void gets taken to the right depth the first time
- Who is supplying structural fill and where it is stockpiled on the pad
- Where the silt fence and the construction entrance are, because we are not crossing either
- Which trades are following us and how many days there are before they arrive
- Whether stumps from an earlier grading phase are buried anywhere under the building envelope
Sources
- Cheatham County Flood Damage Prevention RegulationsRegulatory floodway encroachments, earthen fill included, prohibited without a registered engineer's certified no-rise analysis
- Cheatham County Floodplain District Zoning Resolution (Resolution #9)County floodplain district zoning, effective February 23, 2015, governing use and development of mapped flood hazard ground
Common Questions
The lot was cleared before we bought it. How do I find out if stumps are buried under it?
Walk it after a dry spell and look for dished ground three to six feet across, then push a half-inch steel rod down at intervals across each dish. Soil gives evenly; a buried stump stops the rod dead somewhere between six and eighteen inches. Rings of mushrooms in early autumn mark the same spots. If you find several, get them opened before the driveway goes in, not after it cracks.
Can you grind deep enough that we can pour a driveway over it?
We can grind to almost any depth you name, and you still should not pour over it. What is left underneath is a column of decaying root wood that will keep losing volume for years, and concrete over a shrinking void cracks along the line of the old stump. For anything bearing a load, the stump gets dug out whole and the hole gets engineered fill in compacted lifts.
The plan calls for six inches of fill across the pad. Does the stump work happen before or after?
Before, on almost every site and for three separate reasons. Grinding through imported fill wastes the fill and dulls teeth on whatever aggregate is in it. A stump buried under new grade is the settlement problem that shows up in year five. And where the parcel is mapped, the permit sequence expects the site to be cleared and the levels established before material arrives, not after it is spread.
How far ahead of the footings do you need to be?
A day is enough for the grinding itself on a normal lot. Where stumps are coming out whole for a bearing area, allow longer, because the hole then has to be inspected, filled in lifts and compacted, and none of that should be rushed the morning the forms arrive. On a floodway parcel add whatever the engineer's no-rise work takes, since that runs on its own timetable.
Who normally pays, the builder or the buyer?
It depends entirely on the contract, and it is worth reading before the ink dries. Site preparation on a spec build usually sits with the builder; a stump the buyer wants removed from the far corner of the lot usually does not. On several jobs a year we quote the same stump twice to two people who each assumed the other had it covered, so ask the question early.