everything good that lasts starts with a firm foundation

Moving Forward with My Farm Office

 

the girls outside my back door. hard to get out at times without tramping around animals 

    I know this is a blog and a lot of what I am writing sound a little dry, but it is also a way for me to document the total process of building so that maybe one day I might revisit and write a book based on observations I have made while building, drawing on my observations made, allowing me to write a very factual account of everything involved in the process of building. Hopefully this could be a primer for someone else considering building a home by them self in the future.

        Seems like when you have all the details pinned down on a project like building, inevitably you will have changes as you go along, but as in my case where I am mating one new part to an old part I need to consider both buildings and things like drainage. On hillsides like ours drainage behind the uphill walls is more important than below, as well protecting the surface of the wall is important also. You need to seal with foundation coating after applying a mortar coat all this needs to be applied before installing the visqueen or plastic to create one more layer of protection and this all needs to drain to a footer drain, sounds easy enough to get you a water free slab on grade floor. Backfilling with gravel instead of soil also helps water wick to footer drains, and away from your wall.

      This still all depends on how you install piping through your building to the downhill slide of the building. A floor plan would include gravel under a reinforced slab under a layer of plastic sheeting or moisture barrier and whereby this gravel leads to drainage lines installed under the slab. This will have positive drainage to outside of the building.  Downspouts should not run through your floor slab and should be separate of the footer drain, due to leaves and other materials accumulating in the drains causing a backup which may lead to intrusion into the floor slab. Any footer drain should also have a clean out for each straight length as an extra protection against blockage and eventual water damage to floor slab.

 

footer starting to show 

        I plan on having a gentle arched roof with downspouts on the backside to also consider. This I plan to shoot out the other way and I will make out of redwood with an aluminum insert to protect the wood. From the outside the gutters will look like old fashioned wood gutters and I will try and see if I can find some funnels to divert rainfall from one to other to eventually end up in a drainage line as opposed to using downspouts. The ideal down spout would be copper but that is beyond my present ability but will put on my wish list to try and find used.

       Yesterday I managed to get some more of the footer dug out and it seems to be going ok, the soil is a shale type and is easy digging as long as you like using a pick and a spud bar it isn’t a hard rock but instead is layered and if you are able to enter the layers from the side it digs up fairly easy. I try to do four wheel barrow loads or until my back is sore.  The footer has to be wide enough to support the weight of the blocks which are going to be 12x 16 in. concrete blocks. The footer by engineering standards should be 2 x the width of the wall, but you can slip by with footer 20 inches wide which will give you a lip of 6 inches on back side and 2 inches on front side. The larger lip is to be placed to the hillside and when reinforcing rods are inserted and brought up to the interior of the block cavities and then a grout mixture is used to fill the cavity, produces a solid wall that will resist overturning. 

 

babe and lily eating of same bowl while i am watching. babe was on her best behavior, but wanted to make sure she had the mother lode of her own food before lily the cat.

       The way it resists overturning is because the weight pushing down on the 6 inch side will be enough to keep the footer in place while the reinforcing and the grout in the block wall will also help hold the wall in place as one integral unit. For this reason I move the wall to the front side and this will also allow me more room to install the mortar coat and do the necessary water proofing I need to do to prevent a wet floor. On the front side of the floor slab where the footer and the floor slab migrate out of the ground it becomes important to frost proof the slab and when I get to that point will spend time talking about that. The back side being below grade will not have to worry about freeze proofing as it rarely will freeze below grade to the extent of the back walls depth. The back wall of the addition is the one against the hillside.

      For those of you who follow my blog bear with me as I will occasionally divert to other subjects as I go along in an attempt to keep interest in my blog. Sorry if it seems as if I am using this thing as a tool. But in ways that is what it is. In fact it is anything I want it to be. I use it for storage quite often and at times it is quite raw as it should be. I am writing without a plan most of the time and edit as I go along choosing to get my thoughts down on a daily basis or as often as I can. Thank you for following me. Your input is valuable and let me know by offering opinions of what you think I am doing wrong. I don’t always agree but take all opinions in consideration.