VirginBuilder

Clean Slate

In these photos you can start seeing the evolution of the property. The house was down and we were seeing how we exactly the house would fit. We raked the site clean and marked out the edges. Everything that I had read about foundations was to add about 3 feet around the perimeter to allow room to work and to move things around. This early in the project I allowed myself to be influenced by everybody else who thought that 1 foot would be just fine. BIG MISTAKE!!!! If you have a gut feeling and info to back it up, particularly if it involves overkill you should really go with it. This happened with both the house and garage foundations and had to be resolved with laborious hand-digging and hiring someone to work a pick-axe for a day, and eventually just bringing the excavator back. All told not following my intuition cost $1000 by going with too small of pads.

Anyway, it was extremely cool to have the site being carved up and creating a nice flat work surface to start building. It seemed easier to create a large flat area and build the footings up rather than dig the footings in. I'm not sure how it would have worked the other way, but this seemed to work out fine.

One problem we ran into was the level of the sewer. As you can see in the photos, the site slopes down from the street. Oddly, the main sewer line is in the street UP the hill, buried about 12' deep. As our architect pointed out, in the 1920's when the sewer was installed, accuracy wasn't paramount. So, 12' could probably mean anything from 10' to 14'. Someone probably looked down in the hole and said it looked like 12'. Also, who knows what slope the thing was at? So, we had to dig. I pulled the sewer card (fortunately it was on-line at the city planning website) and made our best guess as to where we would hit it near the house. We had a shared line with the neighbors, and we wanted to hit the branch that drained our house only. We were lucky and found it, but it was 3 feet shallower than we expected. We factored in the necessary slope for the plumbing lines for the house (working backwards from the furthest plumbing fixture) and that meant the pad for our house would have to be higher than we thought. Originally the street side of the house was going to have a 4' concrete wall almost completely buried. Now, only the bottom foot would be. It changes the look of the house a bit, but I don't mind how it came out.

The garage is on the alley side and you can see one picture of the little Kubota excavator that the guy used. Amazingly this small tractor dug out our house pad, garage pad, and leveled it all to within 1" in a day and a half, including removing an existing rockery. If you end up doing stuff yourself it seems cheaper to hire out some parts of it. Obviously buying a tractor would be expensive ($12-20K) and unless you are an experienced driver it takes a LONG time to get it right. So, even renting a tractor at $200-350 a day ended up being a lot more expensive.

posted by VirginBuilder @ 11:58 AM