All About ICF Foundations | This Old House

[Music] Hey good morning Tommy hey Kevin Hawaii all right Wow progress we are fully excavated looks like the concrete footings are in place and you're starting to build up the forms but not traditional forms of this nice traditional forms the traditional form is usually made out of water metal and they stand a panel up on the outside one on the inside they connected with these bars that go across then they pour the concrete once it's set up they strip everything down and clean it up put it up you got a ticket down well we using something a little bit different this is called an ICF insulated concrete form system once this goes in place it stays there forever so you don't have to strip anything down and you love these things right I mean this is the big piece of insulation right here sort of the same material that you'd see in a coffee cup or a beer cooler right this is polystyrene it's a great insulator yep and like I say it'll stay here forever all right well they're putting them in place right now so let's have a closer look let's take a walk down Kevin you remember Ken trust wick he helped us on a couple of other projects what's a foundation oh good to see you again can't see you too are you making some good progress down here so what is the process for you and assembling all these things well we're gonna put some forms together today you're actually putting them together piece by piece all right we're gonna use a web they're 10 inch web so we have a 10 inch space between the two forms a piece of plastic it's pretty rigid and when you say 10-inch can you choose different sizes so that you can make this wall thicker or a narrower we can we have 4 6 8 10 and 12 inch core thicknesses standard gotcha okay and you just snap it into place snap into place because we don't want the forms moving or shifting while we're casting them I gotta tell you even though I've seen it before when I hear that a piece of plastic and some foam is gonna get filled up with all this concrete and stay together it's a little implausible I mean how is that possible well they're designed to carry 600 pounds at chest height when we're casting concrete and that's obviously more than the concrete ways going in that's correct yeah all right well we'll find out in a few minutes ball weighs pretty strong all right so you snap those all together and then you've got yourself what an individual what do you call this um this is a form before okay how are we fixing the form to our concrete footing right here well the first thing we're going to do is cast a footing that's per quickly plumb and level because we don't want this thing to to shift and move so we'll do that and then we'll snap lines on it just like a standard footing will you do and then we're going to use an adhesive and once we've assemble them in place and we've set them to the line we're going to take the adhesive and then just put a bead right along here that's all it takes that's all it takes so that's not actually stopping us from shifting or kicking when the weights in there that would that's just to hold it in place so your plum was set up that's correct we don't want a bit to to move and they don't want to move right they don't want to shift around on the footing right so that gets us to the footing and then when you attach one form panel to another one are you using adhesive for that as well we can and we do we're trying to keep them from floating and that's usually at the top where we see that occurring it's just a B right down here right down there right on either side and then we'll just snap them together yeah if you look underneath it's actually a male and a female joint so when you push these panels together they lock together we want to make sure you line up these plastic ties right here all right so now look at that even without the adhesive wants to get in but if you look right here in the form you see these X's if I scrape that away dig down in you can actually see that plastic tie right there yeah if you want a screw sheeting on the outside of the wall to put plywood to it you screw right into that plastic tie so there's no wood out there well how about on the inside if you wanted to finish off this basement do we have to put up studs or no no studs needed no wood on the walls you could screw your drywall right into there wow that is great okay so we build them we start to put the adhesive down and then we snap them together and we go all the way up which is what you've done pretty much all the way around it yeah and you're still going that's right so Kevin remember we broke this foundation away here and all this stone right in here was a lot of a loose spot so I had mark McCullough i Mason come in and tighten a lot of this up tight but still a regular so can't you describe this piece to the a wall there we did we described it here and then we cut it with a jigsaw okay that's a pretty good fit right there we got a little piece just for this gap yeah all right looks good we'll just keep scribing them all the way up till we get to the top beautiful [Music] [Music] now I notice the Steel's going in where is that going on how much of you use it well we're using one every course so there's eight courses of steel we've offset them all the way up through the forms so that when we drop the verticals down it will hold the verticals in place in the center of the corner Wow every row and vertical that's a lot of steel time usually you'll see two pieces of steel across the bottom and maybe two across the top that's all closed we play this is a lot more steel so it adds a lot of strength you [Music] what are you working on there Tommy well we want to have access to electricity outside so we rather than drill the concrete we're going to put a couple of sleeves in so we can run the wire through [Music] Tommy what do you know about the mix so what they pump it in there is a 3,000 pound mix 3000 psi with a 3/4 inch stone coming through a 4 inch hole and then in terms of this pour can how's it differ from a traditional form well we're going to place it in four foot lifts with it with the pump truck right in place instead of letting it flow through the forms we're consolidating it with a vibrator to take all the air voids and make it flow around all the obstructions in the forms and by four foot lifts you mean you'll do 4 feet high around the entire perimeter and then start again and do it that's correct that gives it a little bit of time for it to settle in and you can come back here let's chance a blowout that's right it's going to give the concrete a time to was set up a little bit [Music] all right so now that the foundation is poured the next step will be to remove all the wood and all the debris down below then they'll waterproof the foundation from the grade down above the waterproofing they'll put a primer on it and that primer will accept a stucco and the stucco detail will match what's up on the house and then in terms of our value what'll be getting out of this system well interesting this is an hour 25 but think of it when you build a concrete foundation you pour it the building code only requires that you insulate it from the grade down not above it not above it that's what you need exactly so now this is insulated not only on the outside but the inside too it's insulated to an hour 25 and it's airtight and all the way up perfect and then Kent's how long until we can backfill this we'd like to see you wait a week wait a week all right we can do that looks great already so we appreciate you and you guys helped you're welcome [Laughter] thanks for watching the soul house has gotten a video for just about every home improvement project so be sure to check out the others and if you'd like we can see click on the subscribe button make sure that you get our newest videos writing your feed

Channel: This Old House

Views: 205,293

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Kevin O’Connor, Tom Silva, foundations, ICF, Arlington Arts & Crafts, Season 38, 7-10 minutes

Id: 1dTsRmoKDKQ

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020