A Solid Foundation

We all desire to have a solid foundation in life.  Well, we now actually do have one, or at least the beginnings of one.  The startling thing is how fast this phase of the project is going.  It's only been 5 days since the hole was dug, two of which were the weekend, and already the wall forms are going up.  Jason, the builder, says that we need to move quickly on this part to avoid having the sides of the hole cave in during a rainstorm.  "Quickly" to us seems like light speed, especially when you remember that it took many times longer to get the paperwork approvals.  Shoot, it takes us longer to get the laundry folded.

Anyway, it's great fun to see such dramatic progress.  Poor Jason must be losing sleep trying to figure out how to diplomatically tell us that the rest of the project won't go quite as quickly or dramatically.  It doesn't help him to see us standing out front with packing boxes and furniture waiting to move in!

We did a lot of research on the best foundation for our house.  At one point we were considering a panelized wall system which gets made off-site and trucked here as wall sections.  The way that system gets installed has the wall sections resting on a bed of gravel, with no footings.  Footings are important to overall stability and durability of the house.  We felt that even though the panelized system is touted as being green, a foundation based on footings is also green because of its longevity and stability.  Here's a link to read about foundation footings and the forces they must contend with to keep your house up:
http://www.askthebuilder.com/B10_house_foundations_footings.shtml


Now the pictures:

The forms and the metal rebar are in place, next step is to pour the footings.  The 3 grids in the center are poured thicker and become the places where steel support columns are put.

Close-up view of the forms and rebar waiting to be filled with concrete to create the footings.

Here the concrete is poured to and we have our footings.  The groove in the concrete will fill with more concrete when the walls are poured, this will add lateral stability (as will the additional rebar seen in this picture).  The blue chalk lines show the thickness of the walls.

This is the beautiful site we awoke to this morning.  WALLS!  The wood forms are placed on the blue chalk lines shown in the picture above and concrete will be poured in between the wooden forms.  These walls will be the foundation (and basement) of the house.  

It looks like we will have basement walls by the weekend if the weather holds out.  Not quite sure how they do the windows and doors, but we'll let you know when we do.

Onward and upward,

Mark, Mark and Isabel