A Hole In The Ground

Week of April 20-24, 2015

With the septic system installed, the site now cleared of debris and other prep work behind us, it came time to get on with the real building. First step: Foundation.

Another visit from Rob and his backhoe got things going. After some consultation about corners, placement and depth of footings, he took the inaugural scoop. 

This is it!

 

Measure twice, dig once.

 
A full day with a lot of horsepower moved a lot of earth and changed the geography big time. When I think of the thousands and thousands of head-high thistles I have pulled off that area, I had some satisfaction in thinking that maybe, just maybe, a backhoe removing up to 5 feet of soil could be the ultimate weeding machine.

 

What a giant hole for my modest house!

 
Much of Gabriola is on bedrock and many people find rocky surprises when they start to excavate for a foundation.  Although one part of my acreage is a damp slope due to a huge slab of bedrock a few feet below the surface, I knew from observation, the septic test holes and other work that had been done removing stumps, that there was a good layer of soil over much of the house site. But until you start digging it away, you never quite know what you’re going to find.

Things proceeded well on three of the corners. As expected, we did find lots of topsoil, lots of native soil and lots of small rocks.  But that last corner produced our rocky surprise.  The backhoe chipped away at as much of it as he could, but in the end we had our own Rock of Gibraltar to contend with. 

My own subterranean Rock of Gibralter

In the grand scheme of things, we were pretty lucky to find only this much rock. Although the problem wasn’t unsurmountable, it did give us some challenges thinking about the footings framing that was starting next. 

As it turned out, there was only a small portion of the framing that was impacted by The Rock. The building inspector was pleased with what he saw and only asked that we drill into the rock to anchor the rebar, so we dutifully complied.

 

Fortunately the footings framing was minimally impacted around the rock.

 
 

The rebar in the footings framing anchored to the rock

 
So we got off pretty easily on that one. We will no doubt have more fun later when the stem walls have to be poured over the bedrock.  But that’s for another day.