And then we designed the foundation it’s very important to design the foundation based off a geotech analysis. That’s where they take soil borings to analyze the soil to make up what kind of soil it is to determine how that soil is going to react during extremes of wet and dry climate. The engineer uses that analysis to design, on this occasion, the waffle slab. Within that slab we have the footings, we have the cables, and then we have the brick ledges that we spoke about before. We also have grade stakes staked throughout the foundation so we have a finished nice level foundation when it’s all said and done.

The one thing I didn’t point out before is the plastic, we have poly I think I believe it’s about a six mil poly throughout the foundation to help prevent the moisture coming from the dirt through the foundation. Kind of a moisture barrier for the foundation.

That concludes our foundation and I look forward to your next video.

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The engineer takes his design based off of a geotechnical soil analysis. So a lot of that’s determined by how much the soil will shrink and expand during extremes of wet and dry climates. Now then, this particular slab has a beam that’s about 30 inches deep. Well, about half a mile away we built a home about the same size and those beams are about 24 inches deep the difference in the elasticity of the soil from this location to that location caused this beam to be determined and designed six inches deeper than what the other house was.

So where I’m at right now I’m actually sitting on the front porch, the form we have here is what sets off the front porch from the main living area. The finished floor will be here the porch floor will be about an inch and a  half lower which will be about right here.

This gives us a lip for water intrusion into the house when the wind blows real strong. But something else you want to think about is that with this being the finished floor height we’re looking for a 30 inch beam, so if you take your tape measure and measure down you notice that they’ve done a good job they give us a 30 inch beam as per the engineering specifications.

Something else I want you to notice with the cables, the cables are lifted up so the cables will be inside the concrete itself if they’re on the ground like they have here they do absolutely no good because it don’t support the foundation at all so that’s why they use stirrups if you notice I actually hold the rebar or the cables off the the pad so It gets welded within the foundation.

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So if you look at the details of the foundation you have the post tension cables, generally you’ll have a rebar in the corners, this particular slab has two cables, in the bottom and one cable on top. So let’s talk about the cables, the cables themselves are about half inch stranded cables. You have a dead end here, what that is is where the pull starts and then you have a live end here. The reason they call that a live in is this thing that they hook up the apparatus that pulls that cable to pull tension across the cable so from one end to the next they’re squeezing that foundation together.

The amount of tension on these cables I believe is around 33,000 pounds, so they’re going to take this half inch cable and they’re going to stretch it about a foot and a half. That’s how much tension is pulling these slabs to pull them together. Again it’s all based on a geotechnical information that the engineer used to design this foundation.

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One, is that we use two by twelves. We use a two by twelve for several reasons, one of them being that when the finished slab is here it gives us 11.5 inches more of slope away from the house to ensure that we have proper drainage.

The other item we got to use the 2 by 12 for is because on this slab we used a post tension cable. That’s the cable you see coming out here, now if we use like a two by eight or two by six these cables are so concentrated when they go to pull tension on it it’ll blow this slab out. But by using a two by twelve we can properly span out these cables to where we can pull them tight once the slab is finished.

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Once the four corners are established, then we can do the form boards for the foundation. When the foundation is designed and put up and finished then we’ll come out with a surveyor and they’ll survey the foundation, own relationship to where it sits on the lot. Just to kind of double check to make sure we’re not encroaching on any kind of building easement we may have out here.

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So let’s take a look at the pad. Now there’s a couple of ways to build a pad but the primary thing you’re trying to do is get the pad level in order to build a foundation on top of it.

So once you’ve got it all level then you can come back and you can bring in some extra fill if needed because you want to make sure that you slope away from the foundation. So that you have water flowing away from the foundation the last thing you want to have is water going back into the foundation and causing you issues down the road. So it’s very important to make sure it’s built up to where it slopes away even in the preliminary stage slopes away from the foundation.

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This brick ledge is only two and a half inches wide because we’re going to use the collector’s stone product that’s only about two and a half inches wide. Normally, we’ll have a five-and-a-half which would be a two-by-six brick ledge.

If you imagine it you’ll have the finished floor here, the concrete will come down to the back side and once this floor material is removed then we have an inch and a half drop for the brick to sit on or stone whatever you use.

However, if you come around the corner you’ll notice that we don’t have the brick ledge on this side, the reason being the bump-out that we’re working with here will be our siding so we don’t need to have that extra lip for the siding to come down top of.

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If you notice we have a main a trunk line here, and then we have the footings going to be coming through here. If you look at the extra sleeve we have, this protects this main sewer line when they’re doing the trenching and plus once it’s filled full of concrete it creates a cavity for the main sewer line to flow through so you don’t have an issue that the foundation moves busting the PVC pipe due the movement of the foundation footing.

In this view where a commode is sitting you have the main commode here for the drain and it’ll come up and then you have the vent line for the commode. If you notice it’s suspended in air again we don’t want movement in this drain line as we’re setting up the foundation.

This area here, you can see where it’s sleeved and we have the the main beams coming across and I’ll show you once the foundation’s made up how that helps protect the main sewer trunk line from getting damaged.

The main water feed for the house comes from about 750 feet away it comes to the trench and it’s fed through the house here. This will be the only location where we have pressurized water under the house. The water line is sleeved coming up to and into the house; that way if we do have a leak over time, for whatever reason, we won’t have pressurized water under the house causing a foundation issue.

This area here, you can see where it’s sleeved and we have the the main beams coming across and I’ll show you once the foundation’s made up how that helps protect the main sewer trunk line from getting damaged.

The main water feed for the house comes from about 750 feet away it comes to the trench and it’s fed through the house here. This will be the only location where we have pressurized water under the house. The water line is sleeved coming up to and into the house; that way if we do have a leak over time, for whatever reason, we won’t have pressurized water under the house causing a foundation issue.

One other location where we did would be the the kitchen island here and if you notice there’s a liner running from from this location to that location and you’ll see once we get it framed up that this is actually going to be a water line so again we’ll be sleeving the water line going from the wall to the kitchen island again for the safety factor we don’t want pressurized water under the slab that’s not being sleeved. 

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