Days turned into night and night turned into day with seemingly no progress made on the foundation issues. The engineer had been working on a plan to fix our foundation for an eternity. Okay, it was really only 3-4 weeks but the time went very slowly. The plan was to remove the back half of the foundation that had failed and replace it with a monolithic pile supported grade beam. In the process we would also support the existing portion of the foundation with pin piles and large steel brackets mounted with bolts (more on this later).
Now we had a plan and it was time to make it happen. To start things off we had a concrete cutter come out and make a couple of strategic saw cuts in the existing foundation so it would break off where we want. From there we got our excavation wizard out on the job again. He showed up at 4pm and most of the old foundation had been pulled out of the ground by 5:30pm.
It was really amazing how quickly the foundation was removed. It shows the importance of adding steel to the concrete when it’s poured, which we had none. Randall the excavator showed up bright and early the next day and we setup the laser to give us elevation and quickly graded the site. From there the string lines were set back up to give Randall a guide to dig for the new foundation. We again setup the laser to show where the bottom of the new foundation is while digging. In this case it was 2′-9″ below the existing grade.
Randall dug with the machine and I followed behind with the laser receiver mounted on a stick that showed if the hole was deep enough/level. He would frequently come back and make extra scoops as the beeper in the receiver indicated the hole wasn’t deep enough. Much of the site is made up of incredibly hard glacial till, which made for slow digging. Nevertheless, the digging was done by the end of the day and it was time to move on to pin piles.
