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!