Week 1: How to form and pour foundation footings

We  broke ground for our new house, and now week 1 we form and pour the foundation footings. The first step is excavation, then building the footings forms, and pouring the concrete in the forms. Here is a weekly progress of our house building process. 

Excavation

This past week was all about getting ready to pour the foundation footings. By last week Thursday the hole was dug. We hired a local company to dig the hole for the foundation, and we will also get them do to the septic and civil work.(If you are new here, my name is Jessica! My husband and I built our own home, acting as our own general contractors. We live in rural Ontario, about an hour south of Ottawa)

We are building a raised bungalow and we plan on using the basement as living space. Tony and I wanted the basement to be high with big windows, so the hole only needed to be 4 feet deep.

Building Footing Forms

Then all week this week Tony and our contractor, along with Tony’s father, worked on building the forms for the footings. We hired Dovetail Carpentry to do a lot of the work for us. He is a good friend of ours and he is very good at what he does. These are the finished forms.

Then we got some gravel around the edges of the forms so the concrete wouldn’t spill out the bottom of the forms.

Pour foundation footings

The next step was to pour the foundation footings. There were seven of us working there, and it still took most of the day. Tony and I are newbies when it comes to general contracting, so we’re still working on our estimating skills. At first we underestimated the amount of rebar we needed for in the concrete, then we overestimated the amount of concrete. Now we have some very expensive fill under our garage.

And this is how it looks at the end of this week. Next week we will start the foundation, as long as the weather cooperates!