This time it’s reinforcing the foundations of the front wall so we can connect to the street. This wall was a bit trickier as we were near the corner of the house. We did have new footings put in but they weren’t continuous over the section that we had to burrow under, that is, the footings were done in small 3 – 4 foot pieces, which is fine normally, but its not possible to know what the linkage between these sections is, there could be rebar spanning them or it could be friction etc… You can see from the pictures that there are some clearly discontinuous sections. It’s like lego bricks, if you want to span a large distance, then longer pieces are better than lots of small ones. We had lots of smaller sections and in lots of places you could put your hand at least 5″ under the wall, not good.
Again we could have skipped the reinforcement, but in two days we had the job done. It was a big job but we did get 30 bags of concrete delivered which was a great help as we can only get 5 bags in our Corolla. I’m not sure Aimee wanted to go ahead with this project but now it’s done we’re both glad we did it as tunneling under this wall is now stress free.
Oh and on the back wall I did start counting, in chalk, the number bags of concrete we used, alas the camera has a limitation of 40,000 pics even though there was plenty more space on the SD card. This was a big pour and I think we used over forty 80 lbs bags. Pain in the back, literally.
The finished product can be seen below and the reason the concrete shows differences in colour is that we used different manufactures when we ran out of our delivery load. All of this will eventually get covered up by our concrete slab which we’d like to get done this year if possible.
Better safe than sorry, great work.
Cheers Chris – I think we are pretty happy with the work and now that task is behind us etc. and we’ve gained some experience in the process 🙂