We dug up the rest of the hole we need to do the foundation and got a couple of surprises.
We had dug down to bedrock under the original east side of the house and we thought we had a large enough space to conclude that the bedrock was about there for the entire footprint of the new house. But this wouldn’t be our property if it was that easy, would it? Of course not. Instead, we found that was the high point of the bedrock and the bedrock was several inches lower under the west side of the house and also dips down on the north end.
Why is this a big issue? Because we calculated how much ICF block we would need for the foundation based on the bedrock level under the east side of the house. With the west side being so much lower we need to rework how we’re going to do the foundation. Do we get more ICF blocks or stagger the blocks to make what we have do the job we need to do? We’re not sure yet. All we know for sure right now is all our math for the ICF calculation was wrong.
But that’s not the only problem we face with the west side being so much lower than the east side. The other problem is that we now have a lot more dirt than we thought we would have to deal with. The picture above is just a small sample of just how much dirt we have. We planned to use the dirt as fill-in around the foundation (duh!) and to do some landscaping on the rest of the property. Only we have so much more than we need for that, and even more, if we stagger the ICF blocks instead of getting more. We’re probably going to have to pay someone to cart it away, which wasn’t in the original plan.
We also had some fun this week as when we laid out the house in the pit we discovered the pit wasn’t quite large enough. Thankfully we have the tractor and it wasn’t far off as it’s unlikely that we could get the excavator back anyway. Everyone working in construction seems to be crazy busy right now. The pit is large enough now and it’s been laid out. Stay tuned next week as we start on the footings. It’s getting exciting as the new house comes into existence.
That’s about it for now. Check out our Facebook page for more pictures and, as always, thanks for being here with us. See you next week!
Huron The Lake 