Digging the Big Hole

One of the attributes of our lot is that it allows a house to be embedded in the hillside so that part of it is earth-sheltered and the other side is open. I remember a house I saw back in Denver that had a walkout basement and I liked the concept. The thing about most basements is that they are dark and dank and you have to descend a staircase to get into them; this one was not that way and the fact that you could walk straight out of it and it had windows made the basement into a nice space. Unlike Denver, basements in the south are very often a bad idea because of all the rain we get, but a walkout can work if the drainage is right and allows rainwater to be directed away from the foundation.

In April we had the basement excavated. They used a machine they called a loader (before talking to the owner I would have called it a bulldozer but he explained the difference to me). He used the big machine on tracks not only to excavate the hole but also to push over some fairly large trees. The largest of them was a white oak with a trunk diameter of about 30". When we had the site cleared a few years ago we had chosen to save this tree, but that year was very hot and dry and the root damage from creating the nearby road spelled its doom.  In all we took down 7 large hardwood trees that were either too dangerous to have so close to the house or that blocked too much of the sun. I have spent many hours since then cutting them up and burning the limbs. When we had originally cleared the lot I had the contractor do all of this work at that time. This time, after doing it all myself (with some help from friends and family) I now have more appreciation for how much hard work is involved. I always hate to remove large trees; we counted the rings in one of them and it was over 150 years old. On the other hand, more than one of them ended up being hollow, which really weakens them. Having a 90' tall tree fall on your house is never a good thing.

The deepest corner of the excavation is about seven feet deep and at about three feet under the surface we started running into a large shelf of granite. In some parts of the country that would have meant jack hamming or blasting, but we were lucky and most of the rock was already fractured and all that was required was a few extra hours of picking away at it with the loader (at $110 per hour). When our basement slab is poured, the concrete will be placed over a bed of gravel. We sloped the earth under that a few inches so that any water that might penetrate will run down hill and away from the house rather than puddling there.  

In all the excavation required most of two days plus a bit longer due to some miscalculations on my part in laying out the stakes, but in the end we had a right nice hole in the ground! Next, we will lay in a layer of gravel and level it for installation of the basement walls.