Footer Excavation

Date: February 10 - 17 and on to April 9, 2025

For the first round the previous July I had rented the rock hammer attachment for the skid steer from Sunbelt Rentals in Asheville. When I called them in February they said they didn't have it available. I turned to Tennessee rental places since they seem a lot more industrially oriented up there, and the Sunbelt Rentals not far from the Bristol Motor Speedway did have the rock hammer available. So I took the Tundra up on Monday afternoon timed to get there 15 minutes before closing - its a one and a quarter hour drive - so it's farther than going to Asheville but nice to travel fresh roads.

Brian arrived Tuesday morning ready to rumble and made short work of the loosened rock corner:

 

I was using the tractor in parallel to remove spoils.  Its looking like a nice clean edge:

 

 And on that edge he uncovered the spring that I had heard at the bottom of the rock drill hole. 

 

Coincident with the water was a layer of pure but sloppy clay about 5 inches thick. So the footer trench ended up deeper than desired because I had to get to the bottom of it.

We got quite a bit done in one day, but that heap of spoils is sitting right where the footing trench needs to go. And the mud was getting egregious.

 

 Thursday evening I put in a drain pipe to avoid having water run over the site all the time. I was pressed for time so only made it as deep as needed to have a gradual drop.

Besides documenting the location with pictures, I took a page out of the power company book and bury a warning tape above the pipe.

 

  

 I wanted to make sure that we used the big machine to take out whatever solid rock was still there because my tractor couldn't deal with it.  You can see in this video that we've worked beyond the main hump in the back:

Brian almost pounded right through the drain pipe - although I told him I'd put in a drain and showed him the downstream side, he didn't imagine that the pipe ran where it did. Luckily I noticed when he hammered right next to it and let him know exactly where it was. 

 

Another worry was making sure the footing trench was actually in the right place, size and more-or-less square.  By the end of Friday we had something looking pretty official with that clay spot and spring dead center of this pic. For example, the careful observer will note that in the video showing the spring above, the ditch was right against the wall, where the footing would not be. That's corrected in the photo below.

 

 

 

 Saturday the weather was nasty and I didn't want to muddy up my raincoat, so I Hefty-ed it:

 

 

Over the weekend I got the rest of the pile moved out (i.e. rocks sorted into size-based piles) then did a careful measurement of the foot print.  Glad I did because there were a couple spots that needed rock removed. 

 

Monday had extra focus since I had a hard stop at 3pm to go return the rock hammer rental for the 1 week price.

 

These pictures were taken Monday evening after the rock hammer was turned in. From here I should be able to handle it with the tractor backhoe. 

 

 

Rats! It looks like that drain pipe isn't deep enough!

Now I'm a wealthy man in rocks. Two piles of monsters, one medium and one reasonable sized.

I can't wait to put them to use in retaining walls. 

 

The end of digging was in sight so on February 21 I decided to pull the Building Permit for this project. And just like when we built our house, I have to to say that Madison County is a great place to build. When you apply for a permit you need to get various county offices to sign off such environmental health, the 911 people, the solid waste folks, registrar and so on. This is their chance to make sure you are compliant! It took me around 2 hours to get that done, pay the $614.44 permit fee and walk out with permit in hand. Of course I had done some prep work last year, but still... compared to anywhere else I ever lived, this was just so easy.

The rock hammer action had prepared the footing trench where there was solid rock, but about 3/4 of the trench still needed to be dug using the tractor and backhoe. To guide the job, keeping the trench line straight,  level and layout square, I needed to put in "batter boards" and run string. As seen on the web here,

 

 

usually that's simply a matter of pounding in stakes at the corners. I tried to get some kind of stake or rebar to take hold in the back corners of my hole but that "soil" would not cooperate.  By sometime in early March I got something to work, resorting to drilling holes in the wall and using concrete tap screws (from the piles of stuff I have around here), which worked only if I could find some layer of rock that was not too hard but would still hold the screw.  That and find some spot - any spot - where a stake or rebar post would stay put. You can see the fine artistry with used wood from the barn demolition in the right corner of the pic below followed by a helpful zoom.

 

I bit the bullet on the too-shallow drain pipe. That is, I dug it out, made the trench 8" deeper, and buried it again. Then where it was going under the footer, I used the wheelbarrow to hand mix a few bags of ready-mix left over from the electrical meter relocation task, and encased the pipe to protect it. You can see the pipe and concrete in center bottom of this one:  

 

Because the "soil" was so rocky, I had a serious problem keeping the trench walls square at two feet wide. The rock would force me to make a trench two and half or three feet wide. That eats up a lot of concrete so I used more of that old barn wood to form in the channel in the bad spots. The rest of March was spent digging and forming as well as burying two 6" vias which would allow the sewer line and floor drain lines to exit the building. That's the two pipes shown going out of the south side (bottom) in this early under-slab plan:

 

Those were also covered with concrete. At the end of March I ordered up a mess of rebar for delivery from Summit Lumber for both the footing and the walls to get a jump on the putative steel tariffs since that's all you could read about in the news. By April 4th the trench was finally ready for rebar:

 I rented an old-time manual rebar bender. The guy said they had two, the bigger of which (that handle's 3/4 inch rebar) was reported broken but they weren't sure. So they gave me both for the price of one so I could verify if it worked, and I did have some 3/4" stuff I needed to bend.

The big older tool not only worked, but there was no point in struggling with the newer smaller thing at all. More leverage is better. Just like your serious actor, in preparation for this role of rebar guy I had stopped riding my bike for six months but kept eating as if I were burning the calories, so as can be seen in these revealing movies, I had the heft to impose my will:

 To cut the big stuff, I used a metal blade in the skill saw but only cut about 1/4 the way through, then put it into the bender which would snap at the cut point:

 Not sure this (or anything else in the last 6 months) was all that good for my lower back, which was slowly progressing from persistent pain to numbness in the legs.

Here are a couple as-it-happened shots: 

That weekend I was able to complete the rebar. So Monday I called Building Inspections for my very first inspection! - the footing inspection - on April 8.

 Greg came out and although the water didn't please him, he could see that the footer was all on solid ground. His only requests were that I try to get the water out when we poured the concrete and that I tie a ground wire to the rebar (which would eventually be hooked to the breaker box ground). As it happened, in my piles of stuff, I had (and could lay my hands on) just the right clamp and green ground wire to meet this requirement. Love it when my piles come through for me!

 

 Now I just needed to get someone lined up to pour the footer concrete.