Building A House Start To Finish | Episode 1: Site Prep and Digging Footings

hey guys i'm eric perkins welcome to the first episode in a very exciting series that we're gonna do following the construction of a home from start to finish every step we're calling this home the modern mountain getaway and it's located in beautiful bryson city north carolina let's get going [Music] okay let's check out this house this is a 1050 square foot custom home that means it's for a client 750 square feet is on the main level which will be a stained concrete slab there's also a 300 square foot loft with a bath in a mechanical room the house faces south and features large vaulted ceilings huge view windows and lots of outdoor space this is it first scoop and the house is underway well it wasn't quite that easy let's start over i spent most the morning probing around for an existing septic system there was a house here before but the county did not have a good record of where the thing was after a while i was just lucky enough to find this a little piece of pipe sticking out of the ground i followed it and it led to the old septic tank that was a major save right there and it was worth the effort we actually had the house laid out across the top of the septic tank which would have been bad news [Music] i had my septic man chris dietz look over this tank and make sure it was in good working order which it was thankfully then we followed the outlet to a distribution box which led to the leechfield lines which we also had to trace down to make sure they weren't under the house which they were man this house was laid out in the wrong spot to start with in order to find the exact location of these leech field lines we used a locator this is a two-part operation one person feeds a snake into the line that has a locator on it while the other person traces it from on top of the ground and marks it with some marking paint i got to try this for a while and it wasn't as easy as i thought it was going to be these guys are pros and they know it right there that uh takes some practice it's not as easy as it looks actually yeah take a look at what that looks like saves a lot of probe and yeah wow all right she's got a little light on her head and she's getting a little damned looks like a little key fob for your truck almost yeah cool all right we've located that line now we're gonna mark six feet off the line because five feet is the minimum and we actually don't have much room on this property so we need every bit we can get a foot extra just to be safe from all this septic stuff and we can actually start laying it out we started laying out this foundation by setting one corner one pin to start with and then we were able to pull diagonals along with a straight measurement with long tapes to get all the other corners now this is a fairly small simple house and that's why i'm doing this series about it every step will happen a little faster than on a big project all right 41 2 and 3 16 it's right there pop it inside yep once we had all of the corners square and pinned we pulled some reference locations and instead of using batter boards in this case we just used some 2x4 stobs with a t25 deck screw in the top this is a really flat sight and not a complicated foundation so this was a great way to save a little time also the trackhoe can run right over these things when he's digging without tearing them up like a batter board our next step was to mark the outside of the actual footings now this is five inches outside of our pins because our pins mark the actual foundation since we're using a 20 inch wide bucket we're gonna end up with five inches of the footing sticking out both sides of the foundation oh got your fingers which is eight inches wide this property has a bamboo forest on it and it was cleared about a week ago now it's 12 feet tall again i bought a machete today now that everything was laid out and squared up it was time to actually dig the footings this is the fun part i love watching machines operate i'm not very good at it but chris is really good my job was to run this laser reader and make sure he was digging to the right depth as we dug along you don't want to dig deeper than you need to because you're just going to end up dumping extra concrete in there if you're wondering how i figured out how deep to dig i simply went 12 inches down from the lowest point on this whole area 12 inches down is the code here for frost line and i kept this rock that's definitely the state of north carolina and chris did a really nice job here these footings are straight and perfectly level on the bottom next i went around and probed the footings now the inspector will also do this but i do it before he shows up to make sure every spot in these footings is good enough to hold this house up this will save you time and make you not fail an inspection by the way next i reset the laser reader on the grade pole eight inches higher than the bottom of the footings this will represent the top of the concrete in the footings after spreading out some grade pegs in this case i use 3 8 rebar i will just go around and tap them in until they're all perfectly level with one another and this is really important i put them about five feet apart that way it's easy to get the concrete level if you've ever tried to lay block on a foundation that didn't have grade pegs set by a laser i'm sorry one time some guys did a footing for us and they used no grade pegs at all i watched them cut every single block on the first row to get it done it was miserable looking we also added two rows of number five steel to this footing and it's not required by coat around here but of course we do it anyway it's very cheap insurance to make sure that your foundation is really strong they have to overlap by two feet anywhere they join and you simply tie them together with this steel wire here's another really important step make sure to clip any roots or other organic matter out of your footing you don't want this stuff hanging in and making a termite highway right into your house or getting all in your concrete while you're trying to finish it here's a look from the top of the hill chris actually adjusted the grating so water would flow to the back of the site and then off to the left you don't want it running off the front because it'll erode the fill i also spent quite a bit of time on the phone making sure that duke energy was going to come take these power lines down they run right across the top of where the house is we want to go underground and get rid of these things [Music] thanks for watching our video today and make sure to check out this whole series about building a house should really help you out if you're doing your own project also keep an eye out for a related video that i'm putting out on site planning what you need to do to get your site ready it goes right along with this series thanks for joining us today you

Channel: Perkins Builder Brothers

Views: 1,395,723

Keywords: how to, build, house, tiny, codes, cabin, time lapse, construction, best, series, step by step, garage, shed, structure, guest

Id: w8sL27Tl88I

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020