VirginBuilder

Foundation Part 2, Footings!

Footing

The foundation was one of the parts of the project that I had initially planned on contracting out entirely. Partially due to the architects' fees and partially because I'd done enough reading to feel comfortable with trying to do our foundation I ended up doing much of our concrete work. There are three main parts to our concrete foundations. The first is the footing, a 2-5 foot wide, 1 foot thick chunk of concrete that runs around the edge of the house, under all interior walls, and around the edge of the garage. On top of that are poured the walls. In the front of our house, acting to partially retain the hillside, is a 4-foot high wall. Our garage sits at alley level, about 10 feet below the ground floor level of our house. Since it's buried into the hillside it has a 9 foot back wall and 7 foot side walls made out of insanely reinforced concrete (#5 bars running both ways every 6".) After the walls are done comes the slabs for the floors. This last stage is the only one I contracted out because I wanted a pretty floor! We're leaving the concrete exposed in the house and the garage.

If you are doing your own concrete work, it can take quite a while if you have not done it before. It's worth hiring a day laborer or two. I ended up having to extend the rental time considerably, doubling the rental price. I think I might have broken even versus just buying 1 1/8 inch plywood. Their sheets have a plastic or resin coating on one side that allows the panels to release easily, but I imagine that just heavy-duty plywood coated with a lot of releasing agent (oil) would also work. Either way, for around $5-6K in rentals and rebar, and around $7200 in concrete I did a job that had been priced out close to $40K by several bids.


So, the first step are the footings, and are layed out pretty basically. I had a non-rectangular foundation, and so this took a bit longer. I also was working with my wife's uncle who is a former carpenter and a self-proclaimed NON-concrete guy. To make a long story short, I ended up wasting a hell of a lot of time discussing various potential ways to do the foundation instead of simply going with the concise easy ways I'd read about. The back and forth, wasted time, disagreements, errors, etc. at this stage made it pretty clear to me that I would be better off on my own. There was no point having both of us steadily get more and more pissed at eachother when we generally got along very well. The moral of the story is that it's probably not a good idea to work with family, but if you do make sure that one person is acknowledged as being in charge. Too many chefs in a kitchen ruins the soup. Or, there's lots of ways to get something done, but ultimately you just need to pick one and do it well.

After finishing the plumbing, I was able to go ahead and pour the footings. Because of our site, we had to use a telescoping boom pump truck to get the concrete into the forms. It's a pretty impressive piece of equipment, and watching someone carefully park the truck and unload the boom carefully under the power lines and up to the site was almost worth the price of having them come out. We got our concrete from Glacier NW and rented the pump truck from Brundage-Bone. I would highly recommend Brundage-Bone for pumping work. Highly professional, the driver actually helped us with the concrete work instead of just standing around and running the truck, and provided a lot of advice that I asked for and accepted willingly. I can't tell you how good it felt at the end of the day seeing the first stage of concrete finished! If you do this yourself, make sure that you have LOTS of help. I had 5 people and it was almost enough!

posted by VirginBuilder @ 2:44 PM