The House Project: The Foundation

Well, it’s been a little while since I posted about the house. I left off with the pouring of the piers for the foundation. I’ll talk here about the rest of the foundation work, and hopefully in the next post I can cover the framing. The roof and the rock on the outside were next, and all we’ve really done since then are smaller (although still crucial) projects.

After the piers were poured we had a few days of dirt work and putting in forms and general prep for the pouring of the actual slab. They poured the actual foundation on July 5 so they were working through the 4^th of July holiday. Here is the story in pictures:

First a team came out and put in the drains and drain vents:

Here you can see the trench work they did for the beams:

Next they put down plastic so we would have a moisture barrier between the cement and the dirt. They also put the rebar in to give our foundation structure. The original slab had only a little bit of wire mesh and was much thinner so having the new slab surrounding so much of the old will overall improve the stability of our foundation.

The next day the cement trucks came! It took four or five trucks full of cement to pour our slabs. They were lined up on our street waiting their turn!

It was really fun to watch!

Here you can see where they were smoothing out the first section that was poured:

Man at work!

Starting to take shape here:

We can’t forget the addition in the front!

Here is the back where they dropped the slab for drains (master bathroom shower and hopeful future sauna).

Here is the front getting some finishing touches:

When they finished and it started curing they brought out a machine to polish the surface.

We had to keep water on the surface for the next day or two to prevent it from drying too much on the surface while it was still curing underneath. They came out the next day and put on some finishing touches. You can see here it is starting to look dry. We still kept water on it though, but it was so hot out that it would dry really quickly!

So that wraps up the foundation! It had a week or two to sit and cure before we had the framing crew out. More on that next time!