House Project - Day 17: Foundation Walls Finished

The masonry crew has essentially completed the buildup of the foundation walls. The exterior of the walls has been smoothed over by a layer of cement, and is awaiting the application of some sort of tar-based waterproofing agent before the backfill goes back in.

That waterproofing agent can't be applied until the cement layer is completely dry, which won't be for another couple of days. Also, they have to punch through from the new foundation area back into the old basement, and this will happen in the area of the old rear bump-out. After that, the floor slab will be poured, and then the foundation will essentially be complete.

There was a basement window placement issue that popped up, which Wendy's eagle eye caught today from the dining room window. She saw that the two northern basement windows were not lined up correctly. I teased her by saying she was in a horrible position -- being essentially perpendicular to the alignment plane -- to determine whether that was truly the case. Still she ignored me, grabbed the plans, and went out to discuss with the foundation subs.

Turns out she was right.

The foundation sub had built the bulkhead slightly off spec because:
a) the spec was for a prebuilt bulkhead, and they were building a full bulkhead
b) the foundation subs thought there should have been more space between the old foundation and the bulkhead wall for drainage purposes

The architect had originally specified a prebuilt bulkhead, which is more space-saving than a fully built one, as well as a fourth basement window for symmetry. And he squeezed both of them in the area to the left of the family room exit door landing and stairs.

With the moves the foundation subs made, the fourth window was now intruding into where the exit landing and stairs would be. The sub didn't know this because he was only working from the foundation plans and didn't have the elevations to see how the basement windows fit in with the structures above.

After a short consultation, we decided that the moves were made for good reasons and that sacrificing a fourth basement window was a small price to pay, so we asked to sub to fill in the fourth window.

Meanwhile, you can see the overall shape of the addition now from the 2nd floor hallway window. And eyeballing down the west wall back to the existing house, you can start to see how it'll lay out on that side of the house. The dining room and bedroom windows will be shifted left, and the family room exit will have a landing and stairs parallel to the driveway.

It's still a little bit hard to get a sense of scale just yet, although the addition certainly doesn't seems as massive as we feared it might have been when the foundation pit was first dug. "It's the perfect size addition for this house," John the Builder said when we asked him for his opinion, and we think he's right.