About us
In the ground around Seattle since 1986
Cornerstone Construction of Seattle, Inc. is an excavation and underground utility subcontractor. We work mostly for general contractors, and mostly for the same ones, year after year.
Who we work for
A relationship business
Most of our customers are long-term repeat clients. Many have been with us for ten to twenty years, and several bring us onto most of the projects they build.
That only works if every job is a good one for everybody. Our success depends on the project succeeding, the general contractor succeeding and the owner succeeding. A job that makes us money at a customer's expense costs us more than it earns.
Our history
Family owned, second generation
Keith and Bonnie Ryland started the company in 1986 and ran it for thirty years. When they retired in 2016, their sons Josh and Dustin took it over. They have owned and operated the business for more than a decade since.
Many of the general contractors we work for today were customers before the handover.
Estimating
The job gets built on paper first
Customers tell us the work we do before the bid is a large part of why they hire us. We treat an estimate as the first pass at building the job.
We read the whole set
Civil, structural, shoring, survey and the geotechnical report, checked against each other. Where two sheets disagree, or a pipe is drawn where it cannot be built, you get a written list of questions with the bid.
We check the ground
When the drawings and the site do not match, we go and look. That can mean locating existing pipes with a camera, running a dye test, or potholing a crossing before anyone commits to a design.
We bring a way through
General contractors bring us problems that look infeasible: no access, conflicts underground, a design that will not fit. We work out how it can be built and price that.
One subcontractor
Dirt, pipe, power and pavement under one contract
Customers also hire us because they get one subcontractor for everything underground: demolition, excavation, storm, sewer, water, power and communication conduit, and the street restoration at the end.
For a general contractor that means one scope to buy, one schedule to coordinate and one company responsible for the trench from the saw cut to the patch. The storm line does not get dug up by the power crew, because it is the same crew.
We also own a CAD Truck (conveyor aggregate delivery). It places rock and soil where a dump truck cannot reach, on our projects and for hire on yours.
How we do business
What you can expect from us
A scope you can read
We describe the work in plain language, in the sequence it will be built, with quantities. You see what is included, what is not, and when we will be on site.
No surprises on the invoice
We share the scope before the contract is signed and invite changes. We explain up front how work outside the scope will be tracked and billed, so nobody learns about it at the end of the month.
An honest number
We do not pad a price for a customer who trusts us, and we do not cut one to win work we will regret. If you need a budget to carry to a lender, we will help you find the right figure.
An owner on your estimate
One of our owners goes through your design, plans the work and builds the budget. That is someone with years of doing this work in the field, and years of reading drawings and bidding it. When something will be hard to build, you hear it early, with another way to do it.
Shored and plated
Deep trenches get trench boxes or hydraulic shoring. Open cuts in the street get steel plates at the end of the day. Utilities get located and potholed before we dig across them.
One crew, start to finish
The people who dig the foundation also lay the pipe and prepare the street for restoration. The sequence gets planned once, by the people doing it.
Where we work
Seattle and the Eastside
Most of our work is in Seattle, Mercer Island, Bellevue, Kirkland, Shoreline and the rest of King County. We travel farther for the right project and the right customer.