Join William Reid as he explores the critical role of civil engineers in home construction projects. Learn when you need one, what they do, and how they can save you thousands while protecting your investment.

Civil engineers handle everything outside your home's building envelope - and they might be the most important design professional you've never heard of. In this episode, William Reid breaks down when you need a civil engineer, what they actually do, and how they can save you thousands in construction costs while protecting your investment for decades.

From water management and grading design to septic systems and fire department compliance, learn why civil engineers are the unsung heroes of successful home projects. Whether you're planning new construction, a major addition, or dealing with site challenges, this episode provides the insider knowledge every homeowner needs.

Discover the "Lords of the Dirt" design team approach and how civil engineers collaborate with surveyors, geotechnical engineers, and architects to create the foundation for quality construction. Plus, get the critical questions to ask your design team and warning signs that could save your project.

Key Timestamps:

[00:00:00 - 00:04:00] Introduction: What is a Civil Engineer?

• Definition: Handles everything outside your building's 2-foot perimeter

• Projects that need civil engineers: complex homes, sloping lots, large parcels

• The "Lords of the Dirt" design team collaboration

[00:04:00 - 00:09:00] Site Analysis and Water Management

• Why water intrusion is the #1 home killer

• Site analysis using survey and topographic data

• Collaboration with architects on optimal building placement

• Modern requirements for on-site water retention

[00:09:00 - 00:14:00] Grading Design and Cost Control

• Cut and fill calculations for accurate contractor bids

• Retaining wall design and placement

• How detailed plans eliminate "surprise" costs

• Real-world example: estate project cost savings

[00:14:00 - 00:21:00] Infrastructure and Utilities

• Driveway design and fire department compliance

• Utility routing: power, water, sewer, communications

• Septic system design for rural properties

• Secondary leach field requirements

[00:21:00 - 00:29:00] Deliverables: What You Get

• Civil plan sets: hardscape, grading, utilities, septic

• Cross-sections and elevation details

• Stormwater and erosion control plans

• Calculation packages for city approval

[00:29:00 - 00:35:00] Cost, Value, and Team Collaboration

• Investment range: $10,000-$35,000 (2-3% of project cost)

• Value factors: design quality, cost certainty, long-term protection

• When to engage: early schematic design phase

• The collaborative design table approach

[00:35:00 - 00:41:00] Red Flags and Best Practices

• Warning signs: contractors who say "we don't need an engineer"

• Key questions to ask your design team

• Real example: walking the site during storms

• Why civil engineering shouldn't be optional

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Now, a civil engineer takes all of that data and design data from your architect and brings it together into a set of plans and specifications for the project to govern everything that happens outside the boundaries of your structure. Think about a civil designer this way: if you were to draw a perimeter about two feet around the [00:01:00] building that you're about to build, everything outside of that perimeter to the property lines and even beyond the property lines is what a civil engineer addresses.

Now, it's a little hard for a homeowner to get that perspective because, well, how much really is there to that? You've got the dirt, you've got the driveway, you've got some things out there. But I want to share with you what this is all about and why this is so important.

Projects that would really apply to using a civil engineer would be projects that are probably on the larger size—not necessarily, but for the most part—larger custom homes, meaning complex homes on large parcels. Parcels that are sloping or that have complex things happening on them where a civil engineer can really bring a lot of value.

But projects of new construction most certainly would need a civil engineer on more complex lots. Even significant expansions and additions that are on a sloping lot or have other dynamics around them require a civil engineer. If you have an installation of a new septic system—so you're not able to connect to a city or county [00:03:00] sewer system and you need to do an onsite septic system—civil engineers are the ones that design these, and excavation contractors use that information to build the systems.

One of the biggest things, and I know I've mentioned this before, but water intrusion is the number one killer of homes. That usually comes from the site. It can come from a plumbing leak too, but in this case, it comes from the site. So a civil engineer will look at the dynamics of the property and the buildings and collaborate with your architect to place the home and buildings in proper locations, and then mitigate any drainage that's required on the project.

It's also becoming more and more of a requirement by city and county regulations that they expect a grading and drainage plan. That's a term that's used a lot, and a grading and drainage plan is simply a plan showing how you're planning to deal with all of the water that could be coming down your site, around your site, and the way that you're going to mitigate that so it doesn't affect the structure.

Now, grading and drainage plans can be done by an architect if they have the proper information, but often a civil engineer handles that. So let's go through the things that a civil engineer really does.

So you can see that the survey and topo are really important for the civil engineer, not to mention the soils engineer, the architect, and the structural engineer. Then the civil engineer will look around at all the adjacent properties that might be affecting your property—that could cause water or soil or hillsides or anything that could affect your property or your structures.

Water management is probably one of the first things that's on a civil engineer's mind and should be on everybody's mind, and that is because, as I've mentioned, water can really destroy structures. It can cause erosion where soil can then slowly work its way towards the structure, changing the grade level and directing moisture into the building, into the foundation, [00:07:00] under the house. One of the worst things you can do is have water flowing under your foundation and inside your house.

So they even look at the architectural design and they look at all the roof runoff and where that's going to be captured and design a system to capture all of the roof runoff and deposit that into a storm drain system or what's called a dissipation pit on the property. Many jurisdictions now don't allow you to capture water on a site and then run it off-site into the storm drain system or other areas.

Now, a civil engineer will work very closely with your architect, and they will determine together what is the best location and height of the structure out of the grade when it comes to mitigating any potential problems that I just mentioned. So you can imagine here that we have the soils engineer that's provided design criteria based on the survey. Now we have the civil engineer looking at the recommendations from the soil engineer, and then on the other side looking at the [00:09:00] architectural design, and they are literally deciding: should we raise the building up six inches, 12 inches, sink it down 12 inches more?

Slope angles—for example, the driveway can only be so much of a degree coming off of the street. Architects don't necessarily think about all this stuff, although they can. When you get into more complex, bigger projects, it's nice to have somebody that specializes and focuses on that.

What's wonderful about a civil engineer is that the sophisticated ones can tell an excavation contractor exactly—or really close—how many cubic yards of material that needs to be cut into and removed from the site, or removed from the area, and how much fill needs to be brought into the site or relocated to a particular location on a property.

If you don't have this data, you're leaving everything wide open. It could be where an excavation contractor would make some assumptions and then declare that in their proposal or contract, only to come back to you and say, "We really needed to do twice as much, so now my bid's X amount more."

These are surprises that if we can mitigate them, we will. And how do you do that? You do that with professional design, including civil design. So grading design is really important from that perspective.

So a civil engineer's responsibility and deliverable is designing all of the retaining walls around the perimeter of the structure, anywhere that they're required on the property. With a proper survey and topo and soils report, the civil engineer is now empowered to design these retaining walls accurately.

Infrastructure design is part of the scope of work for a civil engineer. And what I mean by that is any time there are driveways or access roads coming off a street into a property, those need to be designed and engineered. And you say, "Why? We're just going to pour a driveway." It depends on the jurisdiction that you're in, but there are certain requirements for the width, the degree of slope.

Because if you get into a situation where we just decide to do it on the fly because somebody thinks they know what they're talking about and they get in there and they put your driveway in, and the fire department comes out to inspect and you haven't put a turnaround in, you could be up for a drastic major change order cost for the project. We're trying to avoid that. You're going to pay the money before or after, and it costs a lot more money after because you're going to waste a lot of time and you're going to have to destroy a lot of things that got put in.

And show the excavation contractor and the general contractor exactly what needs to be done from the square footage, material of the driveway to the shape of the driveway for the turns in, and the ingress and egress out of the property. These are the things that somebody has to figure out, and if you depend on somebody during construction to do that, it's likely that there's a much higher risk that you're going to make a mistake and there's a much higher risk that you're going to have increased costs that were unexpected.

Not very many people know this. Civil engineers know this. Many home builders don't even know this. Many architects—it just doesn't come up often enough for it to be at the forefront of somebody's mind. A civil engineer, that's one of their categories in the infrastructure design is fire: what are we doing about fire, and how are we going to mitigate that, and how are we going to solve that?

So you have the power, you have the water, you have the sewer, which can be connected to a municipal system or an on-site system, and communications. All these things need to be thought out. Hopefully the surveyor that you hired earlier pinpointed all of the points of entry to the property, and then the civil engineer takes it from the point of entry to the buildings.

And best of all, now you have something that you can hold those subcontractors and your home builder accountable to do. Not to say that they have bad intentions, but this is how we get accurate pricing so that we don't get those Monday morning change orders: "Oh, I didn't realize the phone line was over here. Now it's another 50 feet, so it's going to cost more," and so on and so forth.

So the civil engineer will coordinate directly with the architect and locate those utilities wherever they need to go. Very important.

Who designs that? How big is it? Where does it go? What are all the rules and regulations? Civil engineers know all of this, and they will design systems to accommodate the size of the home that you're building.

If you don't think about this early on and you just start plopping the structures around not knowing that this provision needs to be in place, you could end up with additional costs and redesign, or worse, having to move buildings or make changes midstream during construction if somehow it got through all of the rules and regulations and permitting process.

The planning department and the building department of your city will be reviewing the civil plans to make sure that it's all in conformance and give you the green light to build it. And if it all goes right, that's when you've learned, "Oh no, I need to have a secondary leach field."

So hiring a civil engineer for the wastewater system prevents all of that, and that's why right there it's worth spending the money.

A hardscape plan is all of the patios, walkways, driveways, anything that is going to be constructed out of concrete, masonry, asphalt that will be on the site. And the reason they do this is that they do a calculation. You may recall in a previous episode we talked about impervious surfaces, we talked about lot coverage, things like that.

This is another reason why it's worth hiring a civil engineer—now you've known your costs upfront. The caveat here with specifically hardscape plans, and one that we have not talked about yet, is landscape design. Civil engineers are not landscape designers per se, but they do start to go down that path.

Once you as a homeowner see the site and see the conditions, you may make some changes, but if you can get to a six or a seven out of ten with the level of details in the hardscape plan, the better you are, the more accurate costs you will have to begin with, the fewer surprises you'll have.

Again, another thing to help identify accurate costs, to hold everybody accountable, to build the project to your expectations. You don't necessarily need to learn how to read all these, but you need to know that cross sections is what they're called. So it's if you were to slice through a dollhouse and you can see the inside of the dollhouse—it's kind of what it is, and we're showing where all of the work is going to happen, and they do it through different parts of the lot to convey the scope of work to an excavation contractor. Pretty important.

You may have a cabana that needs to be built that needs power. You may have a pump house, you may have different things, landscape lighting, you may need power to your septic system. All of these things go into a utility plan, and this is also the scope of the work of the excavation contractor to provide all of the trenching and all of the conduits for those utilities.

And then your plumber and your electrician and your communication subcontractors come in and connect to all of those. So again, having this documented on the plans set, civil plan set is just going to empower you even more and protect you even more when it comes to doing the actual work, but also getting accurate costs upfront.

So once again, we have a situation where you are going to be able to point to my excavation plan or my grading and drainage plan, or my septic and sewer plan, or my utilities plan and say, "I want you to price it out per the plan, per the scope of work."

Other reports that go along with a set of civil plans is a stormwater collection plan. Now, this is because a lot of cities and counties require it, and they will come up with a plan of how all of the stormwater is going to be collected and dissipated onto the property. Like I said earlier, you probably can't dump it out onto the street. Some jurisdictions you can, and that's great. That just simplifies the process.

They will do an erosion control plan. So during construction, there are certain elements that need to happen, certain components that need to get put into place, physically installed on the project to manage the erosion during construction.

I hope this is making sense. I know it's a lot, but it's important that we just at least get it into your head, and then you can decide if you really think you need to use this design consultant.

Visualize this: you have a round table. You have your architect, you have your surveyor, you have your soils engineer, and now you have your civil engineer. All of these people collaborate together during the design process to ultimately get the best end result.

So I call it "handcuffing a designer," and I spoke about that in the earlier episodes. But if an architect recommends you hire a consultant, I recommend you do it because they are thinking they need it. And if they think they need it and you have no idea what you're doing, you might want to think about just doing it. So don't handcuff your designer too much on that. We need all of these people together to do the best project possible.

Then you bring in the civil engineer right there because the civil engineer is going to look at the conceptual design, the very early stage of design, and hopefully your architect has imported that into 3D software modeling so that you can see it, but also the design professionals can see it. And this is the time where the collaboration becomes the most valuable because a civil engineer can make recommendations of where to locate the buildings to mitigate cost, to mitigate water intrusion, to mitigate erosion, all these kinds of things, to reduce the cost of getting the utilities to the buildings.

So let's talk a little bit about the cost and the value that civil engineers can bring to a project. I have seen civil engineering range from maybe $10,000 to $25,000, $35,000 and beyond, and it's all going to be dependent on the project. A civil engineer's cost could represent maybe 2%, two to 3% perhaps, of the overall cost of construction of a project. A civil engineer is one of the more significant [00:33:00] design consultant expenses. The architect probably being the most, structural engineer being the second, and civil engineer probably being the third, but sometimes the structural engineer and the civil engineer can get close together if it's a larger parcel and a more complex project.

But it influences like a hundred percent of your project. This is the foundation of the project, literally. They are developing the foundation of the project with all of the other data that we talked about, such as the survey, the soils engineer, the architectural design, and they are like the foundation of quality—the quality of the home that you're doing.

So good civil design elevates the entire project standard and sets expectations for quality throughout all the trades that are going to become involved in the project. So let's look at some of the value factors, I call them, of a civil engineer. It's design quality enhancement.

And it's hard to pinpoint the value here, but once you see it come about and you start seeing the evolution of what a civil design brings, and then when you're living in the home and you watch the water flow right by and not through you, now you get it.

They can't really claim unforeseen conditions, at least not to the degree that they could have if there was no plan. This can reduce change orders substantially. This also gives you peace of mind for long-term protection. It ensures that your compliance from a regulatory standpoint, it protects your investment for decades that you don't have problems to deal with.

If you've gone out and looked at homes for sale, past homes that have been built and have problems, a lot of it could be done—a lot of it could be because the proper grading and drainage wasn't done. Proper retaining walls weren't put in. The utilities are way too far away, things like that.

So you can foresee problems by looking at other properties or properties maybe you've lived in, and how you can mitigate that through civil design.

So what happens there? So now you've been talked out of potentially hiring a civil designer. What methods do we have to hold anybody accountable? And who assumes the liability when it didn't work? Your contractor offered to do that on the fly, so I suppose he's assuming the liability, but is he really when it really comes down to it?

This sometimes goes to not wanting to get the proper permits from the county for grading and drainage and things like that, and we're not really interested in that and building a quality home or experience. And the other one is ignoring drainage issues.

In the past, people have just put that off to the side and said, "Oh, don't worry about drainage. We'll worry about it later. We'll figure it out. It's not that big of a deal." It can be a big deal, especially if it's not addressed or not addressed properly, and the way to address it properly is in a civil design.

So don't let drainage, grading and drainage feel like this low priority when you're thinking about your project.

Let's ask these questions just to strike up dialogue and so that you can learn and know a little bit more about what you don't know. "And do we need a civil plan?" Now that you might need it, asking that question's going to make the architect go, "Oh, maybe this person knows what they're doing. Yes, we should probably get one." And that is the answer you're wanting to get.

So asking these kinds of questions spurs that conversation, and one of the ones also comes up is, "How am I going to get accurate prices on all of the work associated with the lot and the drainage and the utilities? What is the best way to do that?" And if the word "civil design" doesn't come up and things like "we'll just ask the contractor to bid it," again, we're back in the same boat.

Here's a fun one. The job I was doing earlier I mentioned—the estate—I actually waited till a winter storm and I walked around the whole site and watched the water flow, and I watched it flow right to where the house was going to be. I took videos of it all and I posted it to the civil engineer that we had hired and said, "Just so you know, here's something helpful."

So budget for civil engineering early. It's really a foundational aspect of custom home building and design. It really shouldn't be optional. Allow time for that to occur and make sure that you're integrating your architect into these decisions. Talk with him or her about that. And expect some back and forth between the design, between the civil engineer and the architect and the county, frankly—back and forth, trying to come up with the right solutions: raise it, lower it, move it, shift it, change it. Retaining wall higher, lower, retaining wall over here, things like that. That's all part of the fun part of design that ultimately gets you the best end result.

I know I was all over the place a little bit, but I was hoping to get the main points to you to get it out and on the table. And the transcript and the show notes and the summary will all be included in the podcast episode and the YouTube video for you to go back and look at. I'm Bill Reid. This is The Awakened Homeowner.

Thanks for joining.