Earthwork and Foundation

The earthwork begins! First they ripped out the sad, un-reusable basement, and replaced it with a pad of structural fill that the soldier pile machine can stand on.


Then the shoring contractors moved in, and rammed 8 steel soldier piles 20 feet into the ground.



Then they built the full shoring wall, excavating a giant hole as they went along. Here is the beautiful, very expensive, but very temporary wall.



You may notice that we hit ground water. Not great. We had to setup a pump and dewater the site continuously. They continued to excavate the site, and decided that the east side of the property needed some shoring, as well, though fortunately they were able to use EcoBlocks, which are much cheaper to install.


Next they started forming the footers. Footers are thick, reinforced concrete pads that the whole house rests on, thus spreading the weight of the house across a large surface area. Footers is what the original, older basement lacked. Here are the forms:

And after pouring concrete.



They then knock off the form boards, and start building up form boards for the vertical walls.




And that brings us up to today! Looking forward to seeing the basement walls poured.





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