Filling the foundation

We had a visit from the city's building inspector. We're told he thought that everything looked good, except he didn't think any of the dirt we'd dug out was usable as fill material- apparently the cit's had three garages washed out in the last year due to poor fill material underneath them, so they're cracking down on fill material. This means we needed to truck out that huge dirt pile and truck in a bunch of gravel and high-quality dry, compactable soil. Thus, more cost (trucking and dumping are not cheap) and more delay. The silver lining is that our house will be that much more secure with good quality fill underpinning it.

The other complication we're hitting is that we need to get an excavator behind the house to fill in the trenches between the house and the retaining walls, but with the clearing limits so close to the house and the steepness of the slopes, they're not sure they'll be able to fit it. Their options are basically to take the excavator along the rim of the slope by the garage:

From Filling the foundation

or up this slope here (without touching the plants):

From Filling the foundation

If they can't figure something out, those trenches may not be filled until next year, after the construction is completed. I'm not sure why they didn't think of this earlier.

One way or another, the foundation should be mostly done soon, and framing is still planned to start next week. Apparently we're going to start framing before the concrete floor is poured, which the foundation guy thinks is going to make things more complicated, but apparently they've got a framing crew basically sitting idle because of the delays we've been hitting, so they want to get moving.

The plans and the name

Two side notes: first, if you're interested in following along at home, here are the plans. They're not 100% up to date (in particular, they show a rockery on the South side that has been replaced with a concrete retaining wall), but they're pretty close.

Second, if you're curious about the blog name, the inspiration is from a speech by the King of Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Listen, lad, I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all this was swamp. The King said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show him. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in these isles.

We felt this adequately summarized the experience of trying to get the house built, and was appropriate given the "wetland" (for which read "slightly damper patch of ground") that caused us so much trouble in the permitting phase. We had no idea how much more appropriate the name would become when we found out about the soil quality.

Drainage

I'm beginning to feel like a broken record, but... we've hit more delays due to the lousy soil. We've just had a day and night of torrential rain, and it turns out that the soil got even muddier than our geotech engineer expected, even given how lousy we already knew it was:

From Foundation drainage

Because of this, much of the pile of fill material we've accumulated is useless, and will have to be trucked out, so we're going to be delayed backfilling the foundation. We're also realizing we have a problem with the driveway:

From Foundation drainage

What you see here is the corner of the garage. The driveway comes in on the right, and the garage floor is at the level of about the top seam in the concrete (about six feet, for scale). The problem is that black fabric fence represents the limit of the area we're allowed to disturb, so to get the driveway at that level without putting any dirt outside the area of disturbance, we're going to have a very steep grade. We're not sure yet how we're going to do that; we may need another of those huge concrete block walls.

Mostly what's been happening this week is installing the foundation drainage. My dad in particular has been expressing concern about this, because foundation drainage is one of those things that's very difficult to fix later on. The drainage system we're putting in is fairly robust. The white pipes in the picture below are perforated sewer pipes, which drain water out of the foundation. The whole interior of the foundation is going to be covered in a foot of river rock gravel, burying those pipes, followed by a plastic moisture barrier and another layer of gravel. Probably the key element is those concrete block walls, which hold back moisture seeping downhill, and divert it around the house.

The good news is that this incredible rain is sort of a stress test for the drainage system, and it actually held up quite well:

From Foundation drainage

It's hard to capture in pictures, but the ground inside the foundation is quite solid and sturdy, even though the ground all around the house is treacherously muddy. We did get a puddle of water building up in one corner, and some erosion around the inside of one part of the foundation, but both of those areas are going to be filled in (see the album for pictures).

Despite these problems, our most recent visit did give us a couple reminders of why we chose this property in the first place:

From Foundation drainage

From Foundation drainage

It's going to take most of the week to backfill and finish the drainage system, but with luck we may be able to start framing before the end of the week!

Completed foundation

The foundation walls have all been poured now. I enjoy the clean, geometric look of the foundation footers:

From Completed foundation

Next up is installing the interior drainage and backfilling the soil we dug out to get to a load-bearing level, and then we start framing!

Foundation construction

The foundation is now under construction. The footer has been poured, and the foundation walls are starting to go up. It's exciting, because we can finally start to see the size and shape of the house itself:

From Framing the foundation

This picture and the next one are from when the footer was still being framed. Brie and Kael are standing in one of the kid's bedrooms. The open space on the left with the plywood stacked in the middle is the basement rec room, with the kitchen in about the same place one floor up. The garage is in the upper right.

It looks like the rec room view might not be as bad as I worried in the last post, but it's still not great. Here's Brie and Kael standing where the basement patio will be:

From Framing the foundation

The camera is inside the rec room, and the framing in front of them corresponds to the rec room wall, which will have the room's only window. The floor level will be a couple feet up, so that wall won't be quite as imposing. There will be a roof overhead, though (extending out to the framing behind them), so it's going to be a pretty enclosed, dark space. We'll probably grow some ivy or something to make the wall a little more attractive (masonry is also an option, but probably not worth the cost). The basement is mainly for the kids anyway, and hopefully they won't mind. The basement bedrooms both have windows on the downhill side (with no wall in the side), so they should be OK. The good news is we're saving quite a bit of money by not installing the rockeries that would have made this view more attractive: so much in fact that we're coming out about even, despite all the extra cost of dealing with the soil problems.

We considered not backfilling the space between the retaining wall and the uphill wall of the house, as seen here:

From Foundation wall framing

The unfilled space would have been behind the plywood framing, which marks the future foundation wall; the area in the foreground is the patio, which wouldn't have been filled in any event. We thought we could have saved money that way by not doing the backfilling, and building that back wall as an exterior wall rather than a foundation wall, but it turns out that would have required redoing the structural engineering, and it would have cost as much to truck out and dump the excess soil as it would cost to fill in that space, so we're sticking with the original plan.

Kael walks

In non-house-related news, Kael is walking:


His first birthday was last week. Here's him with his favorite present:


He's getting on toward being officially a toddler!