House Project - Day 14: Foundation Footings Poured, Basement Walls Started

Work on the house stalled over the weekend and into Monday as we waited for the town to inspect and approve the forms that were laid late last week for the foundation footings. Apparently, someone at the town thought the rains over the weekend would have turned our foundation pit into a muddy mess since our house is located among other properties that are within a flood plain, even though ours is not. They thought they would not be able to climb down into the pit to do the inspection. But we apparently have very good draining dirt so there was no reason to delay.

So John the contractor put a call in Tuesday morning to the town hall asking for an inspector to come out immediately so that the concrete truck, which was due to arrive later Tuesday morning, would not have to be turned away. The inspector came, gave his approval, and they poured the concrete for the foundation footings Tuesday afternoon.

From the very beginnings of this project, we knew that our driveway, being very narrow and hemmed in on both sides by retaining walls, would pose a clearance issue to any large-sized vehicle that needed to get up the driveway to the back yard. And the concrete truck was foremost in all the contractors' minds when we discussed the projects with them during the bidding phase.

As we saw last week, the backhoe barely fit in the driveway, and the same was true for the concrete truck. Wendy's great decision to spend the $2800 to replace and push back the left side retaining wall once again proved prescient, as the truck barely made it past the house, and probably would not have fit between the 2 original retaining walls at the bottom of the driveway.

Today, the masons are scheduled to come and build up the foundation walls with concrete block. I hope to have an update on that this evening.

UPDATE (10:00pm): They've removed the forms from the footings, and have started building up the basement walls with concrete masonry blocks. The blocks arrived Wednesday morning, and got forklifted up the driveway and deposited in front of the garage.

The masons didn't arrive until the afternoon, and started building up the southwest and southeast corners of the basement walls, as well as the east wall which contains the fireplace bumpout.

One thing that will be interesting to see is how they join the new block foundation to the old fieldstone foundation. It won't look quite as jarring on the dining room side of the house, since the new foundation starts in on the old foundation, but on the kitchen side the old rear bumpout was demolished, which means the new foundation will have to continue flush from the old foundation. They'll stucco the exterior, but it'll still be a jarring juxtaposition, I think.