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Remodel Project Update
5
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| Footings |
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| Here in earthquake country, if a house isn't securely bolted
to a substantial concrete footing, bad things can happen. This is a
bungalow that was damaged during the Northridge earthquake. It had a
short cripple wall underneath, which collapsed and knocked the house off
the footings. You can see that the lap siding has almost no shear
value. Because of this, we are taking the trouble to bolt all the
outside walls to the footings, and nailing plywood on the outside to
stiffen the walls. |
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| The last of the old chimney bricks were demolished and now
we can fill in the stemwall where the chimney was. Rebar was drilled
and epoxied into the adjoining stemwall and old footing. |
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| The most horrible part of the task was to install 5 huge
footings in the basement, 4 of which had to be undermined beneath the
concrete walls. 42" square by 18" deep is what the
engineer called out. After sawcutting and breaking out the slab, we
started digging. Felix decided this has his name all over it, and
proceeded to produce a mountain of dirt on the slab next to the holes. |
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| All this dirt had to be hauled out of the basement a bucket
at a time. We rigged up a pully system in the hallway, and pulled up
a hundred buckets of dirt to be wheelbarrowed out to the yard. I
started to feel like a miner. |
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| We wanted to have the laundry room slab cover over where the
pantry was, so I over-engineered the crawlspace with 4x4 joists to support
the slab. |
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| The new bay window required a pop-out footing that is
secured to the stemwall with rebar. |
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| Laundry/powder room slab ready to pour concrete. |
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| Three of the footings in the basement ready to pour. |
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| The pier footings had to be dug below the top of the
retaining wall in the basement since it was so near the edge, so we used a
sonotube to bring the footing all the way up instead of having a stubby
post that's subject to termites. |
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| The front porch columns will weigh a ton, so we oversized
the footings and tied them into the porch stemwalls with rebar. |
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| Various post anchors with a 1" stand-off were
pre-packed with mortar in preparation for the big day tomorrow when the
concrete truck pulls up. |
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| The big day. The concrete pump showed up late to pump
8 yards of concrete into out footings (which means that we dug out 8 yards
of dirt, mostly a bucket full at a time). |
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| I was short-handed with helpers this day, but Felix, my
wife, and nephew did a splendid job. I was scrambling to finish the
hot concrete that had been sitting in the truck a while. Wish I knew
what I was doing. Well, the results were pleasing, even to my wife
(my toughest critic). I went to bed early that night. |
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