DIY Concrete Foundation for a Shed or Garage

hi david o'dell here with odell complete concrete this is our first day on the job site other than when i came here to do the initial estimate but you can see that homeowner had started this project what he's going to be building here is a storage shed or he might even be a wood shop he hasn't decided yet but he had some batter board set up as you can see i removed those and i shot some elevations in here he piled up a lot of the dirt along the back property line wall and i just wanted to remove all that excess dirt get a flat area to work off of once i got this area relatively flat then i started uh pulling some string lines marking out the location where this building's gonna go this was a long trip around this house you know we're looking at about 150 feet all the way around and a narrow passage about a oh [Music] 30 40 inch opening at the gate that we had to go through to get out of the backyard and this tractor happens to be 36 inches wide so it was a tight squeeze but we did it there's a big tree root from that tree right there not too bad popped out really easy with this equipment now we're getting a rough outline of the exterior of the building you notice how i set my stakes back about three feet that way i can leave those if i want to and i won't it won't interfere with me digging and it won't move my line stakes once i dig out the footing they'll still be there which is a good idea it's that way you never have to keep resetting it over and over and over just set it one time set it and forget it basically so the yard had slope in it the low end is towards the back of the house but we do want to be at least four to six inches higher than you know the existing surrounding area even at the high end of the property which is at the back we want this slab at least four inches above dirt or grass or whatever may be back there so by going four inches high in the rear out down here at the lower end we're gonna be probably a good ten inches high because we've still got about six inches of slope from that back property line wall to the front of this new building which is what you want because you want the water to drain to the front of the property to the street so in other words what i did was i shifted a lot of the dirt and built up this pad in the middle as you can see here i had i built it up about four inches i would say down here at the lower end [Music] and i just wheel rolled and kept wetting then we'll also run a plate compactor as well this is some nice sandy soil so compacts really nicely this ground was really hard man just to drive the stakes and he had to have steel stakes wood wouldn't have cut it in this situation so you need it still almost had to go with like some round steel stakes i mean these flat stakes almost didn't really cut it so we're just going to run some 2 by 12 basically all the way around although the back side i just used a 2 by 10 or might have been a 2x8 because we don't really we are lower in the back so we didn't have to form down as deep basically the goal according to the plan is a 12 inch deep footing at 12 inches wide four inch thick slab number three rebar two foot centers with the turn down into the footing you know on all the bars then also we're gonna have uh two half inch bars one at the bottom of the footing one at the top all the way around so we've got this dirt about the right elevation it's probably about six inches below top of that two by twelve right now which is nice to add the plastic and then throw a couple inches of sand on top of that and then we're right at about five inch thick slab and then we got the footing all the way around that's some six mil plastic real stand this is really standard i mean pretty much all everything all your foundations are pretty much done this way you could substitute the sand for some clean gravel too if you want right now we're just cutting some rebar putting those turn downs as you can see there also we've already have the number four laying in the dirt on the bottom of that footing which we will pull up at some point in time and time to those tails get them off the ground basically and then dolby everything up throw some chairs under there down here on the lower end you can see i had to under pin my 2 by 12 i got 2x6 slapped under there so that's about a good 18 inches you know deep right on this end just to make it level so the homeowner put all the bolts in he put the hangers in also he came up with that the foil coverage on the bolts and we talked about that a little bit within this video also we got a you for ground rod technically the ground rod should be 22 foot but you know this is a 20 foot bar but you can't they they make them in 40s but they're hard to find so we just threw a 20 in there which is suffice then you can always throw a couple external copper six foot deep grounds here and there a lot of options on grounding here's the fiber mesh going in and what do i have there i got five pounds of fiber there and this is 10 yards of concrete it's 3500 psi really only called for 2500 psi but you know for the cost difference it's not a problem so here it is you can see where i didn't under pin it because the dirt is much higher over here so i was able just to uh you know fill up the bottom of the footing throw some dirt on top of that concrete to prevent it from you know mushrooming up on the outside of that form and locking it in as i put the dirt in there i kind of pushed the dirt down and packed it to hold that concrete so it wouldn't keep coming up on the outside edge you can also use like a felt paper staple it to the inside of the form and just let it hang down you know that'll hold your concrete into a lot of ways to do it we're using a 10 foot 2x4 aluminum nice straight edge this foundation is 10 foot wide 24 feet long it's got two double doors on the long side and it's really just a flat roof it's got minimal pitch this is a three foot wide wood bowl float we'll hit it with that initially and then we're gonna also run a four foot magnesium ball float as well all the bolts are 5 8 inch diameter they're 12 inches long and they are galvanized the reason the galvanize is the new standard actually around here anyway california because what they found is that this typical steel bolts um are starting to react with the pressure treated lumber and corroding a lot quicker so galvanize is the new norm maybe in a few years it'll be stainless steel you know so right now i'm running this bull float in order to get all the way to the end i've got four six foot poles on it here's a lot of the water i was pushing off with the magnesium bowl float i pushed all the water to the edges now i'm just dragging it off all the way there's some of that fiber mesh you can kind of see it there you see the puddle of water i pushed to the end here now we'll just drag that off you don't really want to work that liquid into the top surface it kind of it's going to weaken the surface the more water you work into the surface you're going to end up with a weaker surface so you really want to get it off of there and that's your bleed water basically here's the magnesium funny float also known as a a lot of different names for them they call them whips crazy floats um a few different ones we got all the bolt covers off those worked great too yeah i'm going to start carrying aluminum foil they make it in squares that you can pull out of a box oh really i didn't have that i cut them up but i didn't know they made squares like that it's a box that come out like tissues oh really i've never seen that but they have them at the store like that yeah i don't know if it's a specialty item or what i i got the tip from uh a website called matt bangs wood oh yeah i've seen that one yeah he's got a big channel going yeah he's up in aurora grande or someplace like that yeah he mostly does uh barnes or something or framing yeah he does a lot of framing framing houses yeah but he said that you know they didn't want to have the wire wheel although yeah i mean sure you're right because they will especially if you don't unthread them like today we would have had to unthread that bolt just to get the hangers off so by unthreading it while it's still wet it cleans them oh it's automatic it's just if you don't if you didn't have to take those brackets off and you took try to take the bolts off the next day then you're probably gonna have a little problem getting them off but this looks a lot cleaner no doubt about it so now it's a waiting game do you put yeah or anything in the mix no because it has a lot of cement it's 3 500 psi it's gonna it's gonna that's gonna accelerate it all by itself yeah the uh inspector he looked at the plans and it's got the old value and the new value because i updated it oh yeah what did you why'd you spec 3 500 he was kind of surprised i would even expect that of course i didn't know why not i don't know anything about just better and you know it doesn't cost that much more money really if you think about the cost you know for for 10 yards of concrete and it's probably only 35 more to get you know to bump it up a thousand psi is that what this is 10 yards yeah that's what i got yeah he said he had a yard left no kidding nine yards yeah yeah because it was deep you know the slab wasn't just four inches it was about five to six yeah plus the whole footing was about two by two almost the trucks yeah that's the max you see they had a yard and a quarter left so they recycle it the wall everything gets recycled it goes through separator so the sand ends up getting separated the rock and they just reuse it they just drive back to the batch plant and they have big uh dumper big uh areas where they can dump it into and then it goes through a separating process the only thing they can't reuse is the cement everything else is salvaged well that was interesting so tin foil is the new trick to cover your bolts probably a lot of different things you can put on them but tinfoil is pretty simple to get off here's my funny trowel and juan's using it right now he just got that it had a concrete coating a layer of concrete on the surface i really didn't even know it was blue still to be honest i thought it was a marshalltown but it's actually a uh it's actually from roseboro tool and orange they made this one after he sanded it all down i could see that oh it's not it's not a marshalltown good tool though so all of my upright stakes my vertical stakes the kickers you know the diagonal stakes those are i'm going to leave on there just to hold that form up against the concrete but my verticals i'm going to pull which you can see they're all out now at this point the reason you got to pull them because they're actually in the concrete at the base so if you don't pull them today you got to cut them off tomorrow they were kind of long stakes so i guess you could cut them off and you'd have some nice short ones probably one more time in a few minutes i just like to get a little action on the camera so the nice thing about using the funny trowel is it really it saves you another pass on the sliders you know save some hand work down on your knees so it was a little bit wet on that initial so i waited about 15 minutes and then i tried it again hi hi david odell here we're going to be giving these tools away in this video this one you've probably seen it a lot i've used it you know quite a bit still works good um this switch right here something's going on with it it works most of the time but it may need a new one pretty soon i'm not sure other than that this thing's a little beauty anyway i'm going to get rid of it because i have another brand new one that i'm going to keep giving this one away and uh so all you're going to say is within the video in the comment section say i want the medusa and then we're going to put you in a list randomizer is going to shoot out a name and i'm going to mail it out here's the sec next day coming back here to strip the rest of the forms off we are going to put one saw cut down the middle right at 12 feet so we'll have basically two sections 12 by 10. the reason we're gonna do that saw cut in there we're gonna go about one inch deep is just in case it wants to crack it'll crack within that line and it won't be you know an eyesore even if it did crack really wouldn't affect affect the structure of the concrete because of all the steel that's in there holding it together so it's just a matter of its crack control basically there's one little puddle i can see in there i didn't give it the crown in the middle on this one sometimes on these foundations i'll crown them you know a half inch in the middle but in this one i just did a straight rod all the way across that's why you see that one little puddle there but soon as they get the roof on that building you won't have a pedal there anymore that particular 2812 has a pretty good crown in it you can see it you can even see it on cam i seen it setting it but you know the price lumber you can you continue to use it regardless here's the layout for the chalk line for the saw cut because i'm kind of operating solo here i'm just gonna uh find a weighted object to hold the other end of this line there it is a sledgehammer [Applause] here's the medusa from skill so i'm not using a vacuum a lot of times i'll hook up a vacuum to this but this is a 10 foot cut there's a lot of area for it to to wash off the dust matter of fact i'm going to give this particular saw away i'm going to give it away in this video because i have another one this one i've already been using for about a year so i'm gonna i'm gonna start using my new one someone else can use this one somebody that doesn't have one hopefully that would like to use one right here i couldn't get the medusa in there because of that bolt was right there so i had to freehand that cut now i have the pressure washer with me because i'm actually gonna not only pressure wash this dust off but my main purpose for this usage of the pressure washer was to clean the surrounding concrete you know from all the dirt the tractor work everything so that's uh why i actually brought this pressure washer and like you can see all the dirt the tire tracks all this cog it eventually will get replaced from what i understand is it doesn't have good drainage so we'll probably be putting some drains in uh daylighting them out by the sidewalk or maybe coring through the curb into the street and adding drains all the way around new concrete my all right there's the finished product ready to start framing the homeowner's actually going to do all the framing himself yeah he's been watching a lot of matt bangs wood on youtube so um i think that's going to help a lot when he starts framing this out anyway have a good one make sure you like share subscribe hit the notification button as soon as we upload the next video have a good one bye

Channel: Odell Complete Concrete

Views: 138,215

Rating: 4.9016795 out of 5

Keywords: odell, odell concrete, odell complete concrete, concrete foundation, foundation, how to pour a concrete foundation, how to build a concrete foundation, room addition foundation, building forms for our concrete foundation, concrete foundation pour, garage foundation, concrete foundation for home, concrete foundation for house, concrete, how to build a room addition foundation, how to setup a garage foundation, how to pour a concrete room addition, how to build a foundation, slab, diy

Id: fq5--eeff6U

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021