July 26, 2007
digging for and pouring footers
The crumbling brick piers that were supporting the porch went down about a foot into the dirt and then just stopped. This time around we’ve dug fairly substantial holes and filled them with cement.
Digging for the footers was not difficult but not really fun, either. The soil is mostly compacted sand, with clay under there after a while. Digging at the corner at the shallow end of the porch, I still hadn’t hit clay at 3 1/2 feet and gave up.
After the holes were dug, we set pour heights for the cement. Based on where the supporting beams of the porch will be, we worked out a distance below that based on the thickness of a layer of bricks will be and marked this height in the hole with a stick. There was a magical laser tool involved that beeped a lot.
That deeper hole used up most of the initial load of cement, 9 80-pound bags. A few more hours and 2 trips to the store later, all 4 of the footers had been poured and we are ready for the mason. I mixed and poured 1,680 pounds of concrete today.
And you didn’t crush the boxwoods, well done!
nope! but I did fall into one of the holes while I was pouring.
We had to jury-rig footers for the deck at our last house, too. The deck had been built without footers, or at least adequate ones, AND the previous owner had put a hot tub on the darned thing. We didn’t discover the problem until we had the house re-sided, and there was a wedge-shaped gap where the siding ended, and the deck began. So the carpenter poked around, and discovered that the vertical support on that corner of the deck just sat on the ground, and had sagged under the weight of the hot tub. So he dug a footer, poured concrete, jacked up the deck and put a new support in place (all with a full hot tub). Whew.
Hi,
I love your blog and admire all the tremendous work you’ve done on that gorgeous house.
You’re so funny–you can tell you work with computers because they’re called footings, not footers.
Take care,
Helen
J, you may work on computers but ya ain’t dumb. “Footing” and “footer” are interchangeable - they are one and the same.