House gets a root canal, well it’s getting under-pinned and new footings. If the house were sentient, I’m sure it would feel pretty bad.
Some of you may have read from previous posts we’ve had a couple of foundation walls collapsing, luckily the house survived both of these stressful events, but did reveal the fact that the house has very shallow foundations walls without footings. If you’re not sure what the difference between the two are, click on the photo below.
The shallowness of the footings and the fact that the soil that they sit on is practically sand is problematic. The lack of depth means that the walls sit above the frost line, which means that the ground beneath will freeze and thaw which will damage the building by moving the foundations walls. See this wiki on ‘frost line’ for a fuller explanation.
It’s been a bit costly but better to do this now when the ground floor is half earthen and we have no tiling or plasterwork to crack, should the house move doing this work – which I’m sure it has.
The first step is to install concrete piles beneath the walls every five to six foot. Adding these will allow Thomas and Matt to remove the soil between them so they can add a footing. As you can see in the photos you can literally put your arm under the walls either to the outside or to another room. I probably would have positioned these piles differently to reduce the chances of the walls cracking, but what is done is done.
It will be nice when all this is finished as the house does seem very precarious and we’re very careful to tread lightly when working upstairs.
Note how sandy the soil is in a few of these photos.
