Foundation Is In – Just In Time

Posted December 29, 2008 11:10 by Robert

Tags: foundation

This is really the stage of the project where mistakes cannot be easily corrected and the grade issue keeps coming up because with the grade you are balancing two opposite objectives; keeping water running away from your house and enough concrete exposed to keep snow away from the siding and not wanting to have too much concrete exposed from an aesthetical standpoint. For a perfectly level lot, this is not an issue and I thought we had a pretty level lot, but when you actually get into the grading, you will see that a few feet on each side is pretty unnoticeable to the naked eye, but changes how high the house will sit above ground from end to end or side to side. And if you have neighbors on each side, it’s really not easy to just level your lot because you need to take existing grades and their lawns into consideration.

 Bill and I spent about 2 hours on Sunday looking at these issues and also crashing some other new homes under construction in the neighborhood for examples of different degrees of concrete exposure. When a contractor is careless or lazy (see spec home), you will often see one of a few things; siding and basement windows that are way too close to the ground, a grade that does not slope away or may even slope into the house or “playing it safe” and exposing a lot of concrete which just doesn’t look nice. After going back and forth with the plans and land survey, we decided in each area where we thought the final ground height would be and at what rate it would slope away to the property line and then decided on a few areas to “step down the concrete”. This basically lowers the foundation height where there is a big grade change so that you can use framing and siding to keep a more consistent “exposure”.  Another last minute change we made was to ditch the traditional basement windows and go with larger Anderson awning windows to let a lot more light into the basement which we hope to finish one day. I am not a big fan of seeing a big empty basement with a few tiny useless and cheap plastic windows, so we chose regular awning windows rather than the ones that the form company would drop in. To do this, you have to calculate the rough openings for the form guys, but the windows will better match the house and provide a lot more light to the basement for a small incremental cost. Also, the windows are being used in areas where we had more concrete exposure meaning that more of the window will be above ground and a window is much better to look at than exposed concrete.  The widows are four feet wide, so we are just hoping to find a standard window well which will be wide enough so that we don’t’ have to do custom masonry wells.  In one spot however (which happened to be where we have the most concrete exposure) we did a full set of regular windows which provides a lot of light and a nice look for a finished basement room, especially a bedroom. Also, current building code for basements often now dictates that you need to have a second form of egress for “living spaces” which full windows and a window well constructed with a few steps will provide you.  If you are building a new home, I suggest you consider this investment; otherwise you may not be able to legally add a bedroom later on.  It also looks really nice. 

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