Basement dig

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 🙂