Based on the plans, I thought it would be bigger! |
How many of these do you have on your building site?
None: your project is lame!
One: your project is very cool!
More than one: DUDE!!
It’s been just three weeks since our building permit became effective, and a great deal has happened in that time. If you were to walk by the property, you might not think this is the case. Looks can be deceiving. There is and was a whole lot going on that you may never see again.
Foundation accessorized. |
Once the foundation cures for a few days, a tar based waterproof sealer is applied. This is the “little black dress” that all foundations covet!! As far as I can tell, all of Addison County sits atop clay, so the groundwater is pretty close to the surface. As an aside, this is also why some properties require a mound system rather than a cheaper leach field. Two of benefits of this building lot were access to town water, and an installed mound system for use by our little association.
So back to wet basements, which is what we really want to avoid. After the foundation dressing, the perimeter drain is installed around the outside of the footings. This is a four inch pipe with holes that surrounds the foundation just above the footers. This pipe is laid on gravel, covered with a cloth landscaping fabric to prevent the holes from clogging with sand, and then covered in sand. These are all connected together and to a drain line that directs the water to blue sky and little drainage ditch at the western edge of the building envelope. I don’t have a photo of our drain before it was covered, but you can see the white vertical pipes at the corners of the foundation in this photo. These are clean-outs for the perimeter drain. Should the drain get clogged, you can run a garden hose in to un-clog them.
You can also see a little of our geo-thermal loop in this photo. I wrote about this in a previous post. In short, this is roughly 300 feet of plastic tubing that runs out of the basement, around the house and back in. We’ll use this to steal some of the ambient heat from the earth to make our heat exchangers even more efficient. Don’t worry, the earth has heat to spare!
I never want to see you again. |
Next our hard working excavator dug another huge hole to drop in our 1,500 gallon septic tank. The sewer pipe runs through the foundation wall to the top of the septic tank, another line runs out of it to the line that feeds our aforementioned mound system. I’m told you never want to see the septic tank again. If you do, it means something has gone horribly wrong, which is usually really expensive and happens at the worst possible time (like there is a good time to be swimming in sh**.).
Additional trenches are dug for the water and utility lines, which in our case are fed from different corners of our lot.
The foundation is backfilled with sand, and the garage and basement are filled to the appropriate level with gravel to await the concrete pad, which will be poured later.
As I watched them add and level gravel for the basement floor I noticed a four inch pipe that runs from the center of the basement to one of the foundation walls. It was being covered with gravel and had a 90 degree elbow on the wall end to extend it above the level of the poured floor.
“Hey Nate, what’s that for”? Nate Hayward from Hayward Design Build is our builder extraordinaire. “Well Gary, that is for radon mitigation. We always add a pipe below the cellar floor and vent it up through the roof. If you ever get a high radon count, you just add an in-line fan to the vent which will suck all the radon from beneath the foundation”. I can’t imagine what this would cost if you had to install this later by digging a trench in the foundation, running the pipe up and out through the roof, etc. Adding it now, just in case, costs next to nothing.
Porch pillars. |
Lastly, the pillars for our front porch and side deck are installed. You can see just the tops of these babies in this photo.
I’ve had some experience building some decks and rebuilding some porches. I’ve always dug holes by hand, poured a footing for each one, or more recently used those “dinosaur feet”, then mixed up a bunch of bags of concrete to create each necessary porch pier. What a wicked pain!! It’s expensive, rarely much fun, and adds at least two days before you can start building anything.
I was introduced to these pre-cast pillars when I built a deck for my sister earlier this summer. Hard to tell from the picture, but these are about 5 feet tall with a big base at the bottom. The excavator digs a big hole, drops them in place and you’re done. Couldn’t be simpler!!
The only down side is, this is not a DIY installation. These things weigh a ton, (sometimes literally based on the design), so you need big equipment to get them in place. If you already have an excavator on site it’s a no-brainer.
Now we wait for the framing crew. Next time, I’ll tell you about windows that generate heat in the winter…
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