Monday, October 24, 2011

Foundation Completed

At this point, the foundation work is completed! Some dirt-moving still remains, but all of it is minor. The driveway is put back together:


Here you can see the final walls that were poured:


Now there is a solid wall on the front of the house. You can see the notched-out area for the garage entry:


This is a square of concrete that was poured for the support beam for the cantilevered portion of the house.


And finally, here you can see the sea of concrete that was poured to get the foundation to completion.


It looks much more impressive in person. That photo was taken from the northwest corner of the lot. The wall in the back is 9' high. You can also see the three driveway retaining walls on the upper left side and far right side of the picture. The floor pictured here is a bit dirty, but once the framing is up, it will be cleaned, sealed, and should look great. 

At this point, it's ready for framing! There is a bit of a delay in getting final framing plans to the sub-contractors, but I'm hoping work can start within a week or two.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Backfill and Utilities

I'm back from my vacation. It's been over a month since my last update, and quite a bit of groundwork has been done. The exterior walls were covered with a tar-like substance for waterproofing. A 2" layer of foam insulation was then placed on top, followed by a drainage mat. Finally, drainage pipes were added around the perimeter of the foundation. The end result is that when water approaches the foundation, it falls through the drainage mat down into the piping without ever touching the foundation walls. The insulation is so that I can keep the interior walls as exposed concrete. Here's what it looks like altogether:


After that, it was time to backfill the lot. The large pile of dirt in the neighboring lot was distributed back over to my lot and mixed in with some gravel to provide better drainage. 

The neighboring lot

Backfilled lot
Suddenly I have lots more room on my lot! It's really starting to take form. The final steps in the groundwork are to run the utility pipes and pour the final two sections of foundation wall to connect the driveway retaining walls with the foundation. The first step is underway. The driveway is now all torn up for the utility pipes:



When the driveway gets put back together, we can pour the remaining sections of wall.