Establishing A Good Foundation

As soon as the stumps were cleared, Pine Building had the excavators out in force.

The outline of the foundation walls was marked on the ground and soon huge chunks of the ground were being removed.  Talk about big equipment!

Then some bad news.  The ground at the planned foundation depth of 42" ... the Michigan frost line ... was just not stable.  It was a combination of lake silt and other shifting soil that would not support a foundation much less a house.  They were going to have to go deeper to find solid ground.

At about 8 feet, the soil firmed up.  But that meant hauling out tons more of dirt and then bringing in an engineer to design special footing for the foundation walls ... plus making the walls about 2-1/2 times taller than planned.  It became, essentially, a basement rather than a crawl space.

It also meant that a large amount of gravel needed to be added at the base inside of the foundation walls ... and a sump pump had to be added because the base was now below the lake water line and ground water would continuously seep up into the basement-crawl space without one.

It also meant that the budget was now severely strained since the construction cost was up many thousands of dollars over the original plan.  It was upsetting, but Pine Building was doing the right thing in the right way.

So we began to think about how to salvage the project without giving up the specific content we wanted in the new home.  Pine Building was to be extremely helpful in that regard.

Additional photos supplied by Lou Aiello from Pine Building [thanks Lou]: