We’re getting close to getting a basement pour and to save some money we are excavating it ourselves. On average we’ve removed about 8″ deep of soil which will allow for 5″ of gravel, 2″ of insulating foam and 4″ of concrete. It will have probably taken us about 16 hours in total to remove this dirt, spread over a weekend and a few evenings, hard work but we take lots of rests, plus the dirts is basically sand. Main problem is where to put the dirt and the front of our house is starting to look like a scale model of the Himalayas. The dirt isn’t going back into the house, so what to do with it? Feel free to help yourself.
One good thing about this new pour is that we’re gaining 4 – 5″ of extra height in the basement. The ceilings will still be a little low but not as low as they used to be. To achieve this we did had to cut some of our footings down by a few inches which wasn’t an easy job and required a diamond cutting blade on my grinder and a hammer drill. That job probably took another few weekends and evenings, annoying as I added this extra concrete in the first place!! The footings still go down another 14″ so not loss of strength.
We’ll pay someone to do the pour, though at one point we were seriously thinking of doing it ourselves, with the help of course from people who have some expertise in this, mainly Derrick, John Paul and Joe. If this was all we had to do on the house then I’m pretty sure we would have done it ourselves.
We still have a few little jobs to do before we’ll be ready and these include laying an electrical conduit for the mains cable, drilling holes through the wall into our mechanical room for our radiant heating pipes and lastly we’ll need to remove the staircase. We’ll probably keep just the hand rail and the newal post and bin the rest. Making a new stair case shouldn’t be too hard and should be a fun project 🙂
Amazing job. I would keep one of each spindle on the stairs in case you decide to use that design, I would guess one design might be original.
On the dirt front sorry I can’t make it over just yet 🙂
Have you put a help yourself sign on it and is it any good to a builder to mix with aggregate and cement be worth putting it on a free site.
Keep em coming
Yes good point about the spindles. I think only two were originals. Another good point on the dirt and when we have filled in our various trenches we will look out for someone wanting “fill”. Don’t worry Chris, these posts will be coming for years!!!
Have you thought about digging a big hole and burying the dirt?
First thing we tried, but didn’t work 🙁