Excavation

Today, Tony’s and his main man Joe works on excavating the basement. They’ve brought a laser and a laser receiver so they can make sure the floor of the excavation is level. Excavation had to be done carefully since we want the foundation to be sitting on undisturbed soil. So you don’t want to accidentally dig too deep.

Here’s a time-lapse sequence of the excavation.

Now that the excavation is done, the big yellow excavator is no longer needed. The crew loaded onto the trailer. The excavation process is very quick, they started around 8AM and they are out by 2PM.

Here it is, the fully excavated site. The floor of the excavated site is nice and flat. And I got a small mountain of dirt in my back yard.

Here’s a photo of the excavated site from the back of the property. Yes that orange stick you see on the bottom left is the pin left by the surveyor. It says 1.48 to BLDG. You might wonder why the excavation went that far away from the building. Well the reason is my house has some very large footings under the piers that supports the steel columns. Those footings are 4′ x 4′, and they stick out under the foundation wall by 20″. Then factor in a bit more space needed to run the weeping tile, you can see why they had to excavate significantly more than usual. On the north side, the pier footer is flush with the rest of the strip foundation footing since it is only 1′ away from the property line.