Excavation & Footings
(November 2001)
This site has definitely offered some challenges. First we hit rock and had to rent an enormous track hoe with a jackhammer — the kind of track hoe that normally lives in a rock quarry because it's too big and too heavy to haul.
She was pretty ugly, but she did the job — hammering through about six feet of compressed sandstone.
Once we chipped out the rock we had another problem — a 20-foot cut on the east side of the site and a 16-foot bank of excavated material on the south side, both of which were pretty unstable in wet weather.
Did I mention it's November? And that torrential rains started the day after we got the track hoes out of the pit?
Well, it rained. And we had cave-ins, which we cleaned up and then lined the bank with visqueen. We weighted it down with sandbags and lashed it with 2x4s and rope.
And then the winds came. The night after we put it up, we had 85-mph winds. As my daughter said, "God laughed at your visqueen."
So OK. The next day we cleaned up the site, packed all the visqueen into the trash trailer and had our foundation guy, Ryan Knott, line the banks with shotcrete. Mercifully the rains let up for that day and we were able to stabilize things. And a good thing too, because the next day and all that weekend it just poured rain. We're talking Oregon coast here — the proverbial cow and the flat rock.
Next we had to cut a keyway into the rock ledge to lock our footing into the sandstone. That was almost as fun as the shotcrete. The concrete cutter cut the outline and we jackhammered out the slot. I seem to remember it was raining that day.
But we finally got all the prep done and started on the footings.
As of 12/9 we're ready to pour, but we have to wait for the building inspector to sign off on the structural engineer's solution for wind load and sheer strength. It probably wouldn't affect the footings, but it seems safer to wait until we know for sure.