Building a New House – Digging the Footers

They started digging the footers today. Around 11:00 the builder called. The grader had called him and said he was not hitting stable ground. He had already gone down as far as is typical, but was hitting soft soil and clay.

The first contractor had warned us about this when we originally talked about building in a flood zone. We know there used to be a lake near where we are building. I don’t believe it went this far, but we could be hitting silt. And we know there are springs in the area.

We made an appointment to meet him at the site in a couple of hours. In the mean time, they would keep digging.

By the time we got there everybody had a better idea of what was going on. The back hoe did eventually hit “lake bottom”. We are going to have some very deep footers, but it looks like we won’t have to do any additional engineering.

We don’t want the house to settle.

The inspector will check the soil density with a penetrometer. That’s just a fancy word for poking in to make sure it is not too soft. We poked away, and it looks solid enough at the bottom of the trench.

Next: Building Our New Schumacher Home: Foundation Construction >