Post date: Dec 13, 2014 10:18:18 PM
Excavating for my house will be a big deal. Not that we boys don’t enjoy pushing dirt around — it is great fun. But the amount of soil that must be removed for the foundations and floor structure — and what to do with all that soil — is an interesting problem.
If my house floor were to be level with the existing soil we would need to dig 4 1/2 feet down to accommodate the following levels below the floor:
That would mean moving 1220 square feet floor area x 4.5 feet depth = 5,500 cubic feet of dirt, which would form a berm 8’ high, 10’ wide, and 35’ long! What to do with all this dirt?
We could truck it away. I’m not particularly fond of this solution. I don’t wish to pay for all that hauling and we may have a use for the dirt, as explained below.
We could spread it out over the rest of the lot, which is about 7500 sq feet in area. That means (assuming we taper the soil level near the edges of the lot), raising the ground level about a foot over the entire lot.
But, wait, we need to raise the house in order for the sewage to flow into the relatively shallow sewer main. A sewer pipe sloping 1/4” per foot up from the sewer connection 68’ away rises just to the current level of the soil where the house will be built. If we make the concrete blocks and slab from that level upward, we might be able to embed the sewer line in the insulation under the floor, but the concrete blocks plus the slab means the house must be at least 18” above current grade. And we still need to remove three feet of soil for the gravel and insulation.
Each foot that we raise the house means one foot less depth needed to excavate. Assuming we can raise the house 18” reduces the volume of excavated dirt to ‘only’ 3600 cubic feet, which would raise the level of the ground around the house by 6” if uniformly spread.
But we don’t want to spread it uniformly, because a house that is 18” above ground level will look as though it is (and will actually be) built on a pedestal. The perimeter of the house is about 180’. So we can place all that 3600 cubic feet of soil around the house so that it is 12-18” deep close to the foundation, and still it will spread 18 feet out in a band around the house! Surely this much dirt will hide the fact that the house is higher than the original ground level.
Now we have to see what the design review committee has to say about raising the house level.