Breaking Ground... Again
Sun, Apr 21, 2019This was the first weekend of work on site for the year. We had a really heavy snowfall late in the season. Just two weeks ago, we still had about a foot and a half of snow. This weekend its hot, dry, and no snow remains. The season came late but it changed fast!
If you recall, we have considerable earth-work remaining. This past winter, our geotech engineer confirmed the north half of our basement needed a deepened footing (to get to more solid ground), which means digging down about another 10’ in this area.
The front porch’s footing must also have a deepened footing. This footing will bear quite a bit of weight, due to the balcony and roof system above, and must sit on firm, native ground. We’re estimating having to dig down at least 12’.
As we dig these depths, we have to overdig so that we do not end up with a dangerous work zone. We don’t want a situation where someone is working in a 10+ foot trench, and potentially be exposed to a fatal cave in. So we over-excavate at least one side so that the area is easy and safe to access.
It’s a lot of earth to move, but the bigger challenge is where to store it all. We don’t have a ton of flat ground to stage all this material, and we push it over the hill (creating more flat area!), we can’t easily recover it when we later need to backfill. More on this later.
The plan for the weekend is:
- Stake out the front (west) side of the house. This front face spans multiple elevations, and we want to get a good reference now, before we create additional elevations.
- Excavate the front porch footings (right circle above).
- Excavate the north side (left circle above)
- Clean up erosion from the winter which caused some material to fall into the footing trenches we setup last year.
Saturday, we used our new squaring laser to mark some reference points for the front wall. We learned that the front wall will be closer to the edge of our slope at the north end than we thought last year. Good thing we’re already moving that footing much lower.
Pete, from Seavraven Excavating is back up to help us with the excavation. We’re starting with the front porch. This footer sits right on the edge of the slope, so we need to dig down until we hit ‘solid ground’ (firm native soil, but preferably the rock). He started excavating from the top, carving out as much as he could from above.
Then he jumped down to the bottom and continued attacking the hillside. In the below photo, you can start to see the stair step the footing will follow. The footing will gradually rise with the native rock we finally hit about 10’ down.
He was short a hand, so he didn’t have the skidsteer running. This meant that the material was being dumped within arms length of the excavator, which really meant it just piled up very quickly. Pete ended up on top of a mound of dirt that was probably 15 or 20’ high. This had the benefit of providing him a level spot to stage the machine while he continued excavating the hillside.
I experimented with taking a time lapse of the work. I set the camera up assuming the porch excavation would be pretty quick, and made the focus of the shot the north end, where I knew we had a lot of work. The porch excavation ended up taking the whole day, so the interesting stuff is almost out of frame.
Pete is coming back on site Monday to continue working. Unfortunately, we have to return to our own work, so I won’t have any progress pics for the north end of the excavation until we’re up there next time. He’s optimistic he can get most of the remaining work done Monday, and offered to continue Tuesday if needed, and if we wanted. We want to get this excavation done quickly so we can turn our attention to the foundation.
We also had two concrete contractors stop by to take notes of the build site to provide bids for the foundation next week. Although we are currently planning to do the foundation ourselves, we’re optimistic that one of them may come back with a competitive price, in which case we may need to change our plan for the foundation work yet again.
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