OTBasement

update on my project.End in sight.

I can imagine the amount of space you'd gain by adding a basement.
Tell me again - how many square feet?
And how high - or is it deep - did you dig? How many blocks or feet high on the basement walls?
I followed your progress. Dunno if I replied before but have been rooting for you all the way.

wow,thats a tough job! thanks for posting it

Brian, you have different looking soil than we do in my part of NWIA. Where's the rocks? Half of my house has crawl space under it and when I was younger I was thinking about digging it out a little at a time but it never happened. If I would have I would have been carrying out about as many tons of rocks as dirt. Jim

It has been pretty much all bank sand with a clay cap of 2 ft or so . No rock so far,little bit of gravel toward the bottom .

Thanks for the encouragement . It has been a pretty overwhelming project. 24x52 is size . Making it 9 ft ,well minus 4 in for floor . Digging roughly 7 ft existing dirt out . Someone told me expansion rate is 1 1/2 times once the sand is dug out . havn't done the math ,,but it seems like we hauled out 30 tandem loads last fall? Chiropractor hates it when I come in. He gets a workout trying to get my back in place .Lot of shovel time .lol

How long have you been working on this now? Ive been contemplating something similar except i already have a michigan basement. I would like to have real walls and would also do an addition. The more i stew on it I'm thinking about just starting from scratch and building a new house.

Been on this three years ..But mostly saturdays and couple nights after work . Myself and two buddies are pretty much the digging crew . We dig it ,pour footings and ready for two block layers . we do about 30 foot section ,then start over on the next one . I know it can be done lot faster, but doing it as time and funds permit.

Long, long time ago I lived in the old, original part Romeoville, IL. called Hampton Park. Was track housing built back in the '50's, affordable for returning vets was the plan. There were only three styles of houses built there, pretty much over solid rock down about 24", and tons of stone to get there as it turned out. I didn't know that when I first bought it. The week that I bought or closed on it in 1990, I forget which, there was a prison break down the road where six inmates escaped, a oil tanker hit the bridge knocking it out of commision for several years, and a tornado 3/4's of a mile wide and on the ground for 12 miles came through, but missed Romeoville, but just barely. What the heck did I get myself into, I wondered. There were only three homes in the area that had full basements, the rest of us had crawl spaces, and mine was about 4' deep, and very damp. Every time the tornado sirens went off, and they went off an awful lot, down into the crawl space I would go, no tornado ever came, and all that I had to show for it would be covered from head to toe with muck every time I would come out of the cave. The heck with that, I decided to dig myself a Michigan styled basement, figuring to come in a few feet from the foundation, dig down, shore up, dig down, and do concrete work. Thing is, I was new to the area and had no idea the whole place was a couple of feet of top soil over miles of bedrock. I went down into the crawl space with 5 gallon buckets and a shovel, figuring over time at night after work, and weekends, and over time, done. Not so. Everywhere I dug, shovel went in an inch or two, and rock. Then I got a pick axe and tried that. Stuck it into the rock, brought it up, stuck it into the floor, back and forth of that non-stop. Of the few pails of dirt and rock I did carry out, my neighbors were looking at me like John Wayne Gacy moved into the neighborhood, and that is not at all what I had planned. I guess I couldn't blame them. New guy in the neighborhood, coming out of the crawl space all muddy with pales of dirt, shovel, and pick axe and all. All in all, my plans of a basement in Romeoville didn't work out so good, and after doing some research, I found out about the bedrock, and that there was a reason in a town of 16,000, only three homes had basements, and the rest had crawl spaces.

I sold that place a decade ago, moved back to Indiana, and bought a small farm here, much easier to work, good soil.

Good luck Bryan, you are still doing very well, and here's to wishing you a Merry Christmas family get together one of these years in your finished basement.

Mark

Is that an old ford skidsteer?

Old Mustang 310 ,with cage off . Had this for 20 some years . Repowered with onan two cyl out of a 318 garden tractor . Handy as heck,,but pretty small .

Thank you Mark . Tornado's are one of the reasons I decided to do this. That and my four girls are getting bigger and want own bedrooms now !

I helped my parents do the same thing in the mid 70's--used the exact same skid steer, too!! At least to begin with, then rented a bigger one. I bet we put 4, maybe 5 Kohlers in that thing. It will be worth it!! A brand-new foundation, no mice, lots of room, makes the house like new. Do absolutely everything possible--and then do more yet, on water control/drainage. That was their mistake--we ended up adding more perimeter tile a few years and a couple of flooded basements later, but has been fine ever since.

LOTS of shovel time for sure!!!