It is always amazing to me just how much dirt you can get from a small area. The pile in the background is from scraping the grass off of an area 35'x45' only an inch or two deep.
What I did expect, was for the cats to love playing in the fresh dirt...and they did.
Here we are today. What I didn't expect was to find topsoil 2' down in the entire foundation. I don't know if it had been trucked in or if the gods were just smiling on us. If it had all been the clay that we were expecting, this part of the project would have taken much longer. As it is we are already having to deal with a couple of minor mishaps.
Mishap number 2 (I'll get to 1 in a minute) We did not realize that the water line to the barn was right across the back corner of the house. So, after some scrambling to turn off Niagara Falls and some digging to find and re-route the line we are back in business.
Mishap 1 is that the two outside 45' beams are only 35' apart and they needed to be 36' apart to take into account the rock ledge, which in our case will be used for a porch ledge. But Tommy (our contractor) has a solution; which I will attempt to explain to you in the picture below.
Picture "A" is a cross section of what the the beam was going to look like. The ledge on the left is where the porch joists would go. The middle is where the metal building would go and the ledge on the right would hold the floor joists for the inside of the house. Now the beam is going to look like picture "B"; everything will all just shift over 5 1/2". This way we won't lose a foot of interior floor space and wall space. The ledge that is cantilevered out over the ground will just have to be fortified with extra re-bar.
Re-digging would probably cause more problems and this fix will be fairly simple. (fingers crossed)
No comments:
Post a Comment