My Home
Written by on January 13, 2017
FOUNDATION
The first thing we did was set a wood form using the 2″x10″ treated Southern Yellow Pine joist material and scrap 2″x4″s for the garage which was ground level. Around here, almost all monolithic slabs are 4″ thick. We dug a footing around the perimeter about 18″ deep and 12″ wide. We placed four rows of 5/8″ rebar into the footings and laid .006 polyethylene (Visqueen) over the fill and let it drape down into the footings. We then added 6″x6″x10/10 Wire Mesh over the plastic for reinforcement. We called the local ready mix concrete company and poured the slab. Here is the garage form ready to pour concrete:
As for the piers, since the frost line is shallow in our area, we simply dug a lot of 24”x24”x12” deep concrete footings, 6” minimum into the existing soil. We used sakrete mixed with water from the pond since there was no water at the site at that time. We were careful to lay them out as close as we could to the dimensions from the plan, and made them all the same top height to insure the structure was level. We used my father’s old transom he had used through half his life on his apartment construction days. It was a good feeling knowing his old tools are still as useful today as they were back in his day!
I made a lot of concrete piers to place on top of the footings by simply pouring sakrete into buckets after first putting a square 6”x6” treated lumber block centered in the bucket bottom. I had added a couple of 12 penny nails to each block facing up, so that when the blocks were poured and removed from the bucket, the block was embedded in the top center of the pier. This enabled me to have something to nail to after the freestanding block was set on the footing. Having this system of a moving piers set on the footing allowed for minute adjustment to line up the beams precisely. It worked well. Here is a picture I took showing the 6″x6″ treated posts nailed to the embeded 2″x6″ treated block:
We eventually had the roughly 75 piers in place, and began assembling the treated joists. This shows progress on the piers:
