How to Dig a Basement

foreign [Music] what's going on everyone welcome back to the channel today's down and dirty we are back in the studio because it's winter time and and what better time to take on basic subjects like how do I go about digging a basement this is a question that came from you guys in the comments how do I go about digging a basement I'm just gonna we're just gonna kind of put an end to all of the potential comments that we're going to get right here there are a hundred different ways that you could dig a basement everyone's got their own preference everyone's got their own method of doing it this isn't the right or the wrong way to do it it's just the way I approach it so if you've got that comment oh my God this guy doesn't know what he's talking about just shut up no one cares no one wants to hear your opinion this is just the way I do it so that being said we're going to flip over to the top down View and check out my super highly official basement layout now as you can see we did not pay a surveyor to stake this baby out so she may not be a little square but that's okay what we've got is a relatively basic basement layout here so we have your basement outline and then we have this little jog here and then in Michigan at least we have trench Footers so you're not actually going to excavate this area of the garage here generally you will have someone come in third party that's going to have a trencher and do it or you will just dig this after the fact with a narrow bucket and it will be a trench footer if you have no idea what that means well ask some questions of those around you or maybe we will do a video down the road on trench Footers and what that is anyway back to our back to our topic how do you approach a basement dig if you've never done this before uh first of all don't be intimidated basement digs seem very intimidating at first but really what it just takes is a little bit of planning and a little bit of forethought and then you just dig a hole like you would anywhere else so what do I mean by planning well let's look at our basement here so I have a very not to scale excavator that we're going to use for this uh but I will I kind of want to show you guys what that looks like it's way too big I know that we're going to set them off to the side here in this scenario we're going to pretend that the back of the house here is pretty balanced and this side of the house are pretty balanced we really need a lot of material on this side and in front of the house that's number one that I'm going to be looking at when I walk up to a basement dig is where do I ultimately need material and it makes sense right because we've talked about it a bunch on this channel when you double and triple touch material you're you're losing money no one's paying you to dig the basement more than once they're only paying you to dig at one time when you go move material around after that that's on your dollar so the first thing we need to know is where do we need the material because that's going to help us determine where we're going to start and where we're going to finish on this thing the second thing I'm thinking about is how many corners do I want to have to worry about closing out on what do I mean by that let's look at our top down view if you imagine we're going to work our way around this entire basement and I'm going to finish my dig somewhere on this basement which means that I'm going to be sitting outside the basement let's say that I started my basement dig here going down this wall then we went around and did this wall this wall and then we came back around and so I'm going to finish right here sitting outside the basement and I'm generally going to have my my machine positioned somewhere like this and I'm reaching down into the hole and I am blindly having to come against this bank because I can't see because of the angle and I'm having to finish out this little corner here depending on how we dig this if we dig it the wrong way I will actually have two corners that I have to finish out because there is this corner here that I'll have to finish out on and if I didn't think about this beforehand then I'm going to have to come over here and I'm going to have to finish out on this corner as well I don't know about you guys but I'm a little bit lazy and I don't really like doing extra work if I don't have to so if we plan this the right way I can do this with one finish out corner what do I mean well let's say we start our basement dig right here with our machine facing this way [Music] and I'm going to excavate everything from here going this way and then I'm going to continue around and so now I've got a beautiful angle I don't have to finish out I can dig this one I can go around I can dig this one I can go around dig this one I can go around and I can dig this one and look it there because this is already dug I can sit right here and I only have one corner to close out on versus had I started on this wall and I started to dig and so all of this is going to be excavated here and I work my way around well now guess what I've got to close out here on this corner then I've got to set up on this line dig back and I'm going to have to close out on this corner that's two Closeouts I don't want to do that that's a lot of effort and it's a lot of effort I don't want to put in to be totally honest so as you can see just a little bit of planning and we've already started to develop an idea of where we want to start we know that we need the most material in the front and on the camera left side of the house here so if I start on this line here that does two things for me one is we only have one closeout like we just discussed but then the second thing is I can actually hog a fair amount of material out here in the middle and throw it to the front of the house which is where we need it which is key so let's talk about when we go to set up our machine when I set up my machine on my line we've already decided how we're going to dig this we're going to start on this line here and work our way around the house when I set up my machine I'm going to position to myself to where and again my excavator is not to scale it's oversized so realistically you'll probably be sitting right about here but because our excavator's so huge we're going to scoot back I want to set up in a way that when my machine is square with my tracks here and I reach out you're going to notice we're going to set up to where we have about a foot and a half to two foot of what we call over dig what do I mean by over dig well if you think about it once we dig this hole our concrete guys are going to have to come in here and they're going to have to set up forms well they can't do that if the wall is of dirt is right there so we actually need to dig a little bit further out and so when we dig our basement we are going to dig this whole thing with about a foot and a half to two feet this is something that you or your employer will talk to your concrete guys and figure out exactly how much over dig they want but we're going to dig this entire basement a little oversized but the key with that is you have to stay Square to your hole it makes no sense to do a giant over dig and have this giant bow in the wall that makes a lot of work for everybody it's a waste of time and resources on your uh part it makes it more difficult for the concrete guys to square their hole up so we're going to make sure that we're Square so again coming back to my machine setup I'm going to set up in a way that when I do a full and and I do this I physically do this I do a dig pass in the air and make sure that my machine is perfectly in line before I ever take a bite starting here I'm going to start right at this line and I'm going to start to excavate as much as I can reach in this area here but I'm also going to kind of create a wedge here in fact it's probably going to wedge a little bit back as I dig so what I'm going to do set up on our line and I'm going to start making my passes my first pass is going to be right on my line and I'm going to establish that line and then we're going to throw the material out in front of the house now that I've established this first pass right here that you know Pretend This is one bucket wide I know it's not exact now that we've established this first pass right here I'm always going to make sure that this pass stays about a foot to two feet deeper than all of my excavation out here in the middle the reason we're doing that is it's going to ensure that your bucket is held very tight against this outside edge which gives us a very sheer very clean face and it gives us a very square hole and it makes for a very tight tidy basement dig and so once we get this area we can continue to excavate out here at the same time as long as this stays about a foot and a half to two feet lower than what we're Excavating once this is degrade we don't have to mess with this other than just little cleanup tidy passes and so we can get a little more aggressive out here and we can really start hogging now let's talk about why am I digging this in this little bit of a wedge here well if you can imagine as we're digging along we're going to start digging let me check my overhead view to make sure we're in frame here I don't want to be screwing you guys up okay so as I'm digging we're going to track our machine back track our machine back and we're going to dig this to where it's totally tight and we've got a nice clean face right here at the edge as much of this material as we can remember we want to throw out in front here because that's where we want all of our dirt but when we finally get all the way butted up against this corner or pretty dang close I don't have to take it all the way to the corner because when I round the corner and I set up on this line now I can make sure that this little chunk right here is perfectly Square because I've dug it pretty dang close going this way and then we're going to come in with our bucket and we're going to do just a nice clean shave right down the bank and then we're going to pull it back and now we've established this line as being very Square as well as shave this little face right here perfectly Square that's how you get really really square corners in a basement dig now the reason we cut this on a wedge is as you can see again my excavator is not to scale so it's not like I can sit at the back corner of the basement and dig it realistically I'm going to be up in here well if I had dug this whole thing all the way over to the edge guess what I have nowhere to sit with my excavator now I'm going to have to sit off here to the side and I'm going to have to somehow dig this thing somewhat square at a goofy angle and it's just going to be a disastrous mess for me so if we don't dig this area out here and we leave it for ourselves I've now got a nice platform that I can sit on and so we're going to do the same thing I'm going to line up I'm going to do my air pass to make sure that I'm truly lined up on my over dig and just like we did over here I'm going to establish this line and keep it about a foot and a half deeper than everything I'm reaching out here now because we don't want a ton of material on this side of the house I'm I've already dug this whole big portion here and thrown it out in the front yard so realistically all I'm going to do is I'm going to dig kind of this chunk here and again we're going to kind of wedge in so that when I Round the Corner I've got a place to sit but we're only going to dig this area here and throw it out to the side what that does is it gives us enough material that we can doze back in to fill in the over dig after after the basement's poured and then we have a little bit to form a slope away from the house you always want to have a pitch away from the house when you're done and so having a little material on this side even though it's pretty balanced is good because we're going to need to grade up against the house and we're certainly going to have to backfill up against the basement when it's poured so as we work our way down this line we get back into this corner and we've been throwing all of this material over to the side which isn't very much now because we left ourselves a wedge we're going to flip around and now we're going to dig ourselves along the back of the basement the key thing to think about here is when we round to this side and to the front I have to be able to reach everything and so as we go along the back side of the house here I'm concerned with what can I reach and I don't want to take more than that because again if we load up we dig all of this chunk of the basement here and throw it into the backyard that means I now have to dose all of that material around to the front side I've got a full day of wasting gas in my Dozer because of the way that I dug this so let's say from this line here I can reach out to about here and from this line here I can reach out to about here that means all I'm going to do is I'm going to reach out from this back wall and I'm going to dig this kind of Chunk here and it's going to come in again to a wedge and so moving across the back of the house we're going to excavate kind of this big chunk and let's let's color it in with our marker here so we've already got this side excavated right and then as we went down this Edge we excavated this chunk here and now as we come across the back we're going to excavate this chunk and notice we're swinging wide here because there's nowhere there's there's no way we're going to be able to reach that from the front of the house so we're going to excavate this big old area out here but then as we get Within Reach of this side we're going to start to taper down and so this whole area here is going to get excavated and thrown out to the back of the house and that's okay because look at how long the back of the house is we've got we're going to have a lot of over dig to fill here and we're going to have to again slope it and Pitch it away from the house so believe it or not even though we're pretty balanced we are going to need a decent amount of material in the back of the house just to fill in the length of our over dig and to grade this whole area so we don't have to panic that we've got a little extra material but now as we round the corner of this house this is where we're gonna get really aggressive and depending on the situation I actually might taper this a lot quicker so maybe we only dig that portion because as I set up on this line if I get my machine Square in the corner here I'm actually not even dig this section from here over I may set my machine up in a way that I can sit right in the corner and as I'm Square I can reach out this way but then I can also start to excavate everything out in here I'm not gonna dig behind me I'm not going to undermine myself behind me but I may take this kind of whole big chunk here depending on how much material let me see if I'm getting okay we're still in still in the picture depending on how much material I'm getting here I may actually save this kind of Chunk here and throw it off to the side of the house here and then as I continue to work my way back let me spin my my upper structure back around here as I continue to work my way back I'm gonna get again you're always gauging you're always looking to see how much material you have but I may dig this whole big chunk right here and that all goes over to this side of the house and then I'm going to get myself into a situation to where oh we're gonna need more material up front and as soon as I get there assuming I'm sitting here again I can actually go ahead and Round the Corner once you've got your line established right here that you've you've dug it and you have a good reference line we can go ahead and round the corner and now I've got a reference line that I can very easily shave down the banks and we can still make that very Square even though my machine is sitting over here and so now we can reach out here and we can get aggressive and we can dig all of this material now and it's all going to go in the front yard so by Far and Away the majority of the material of the basement this huge chunk let's say we did cut it so you're talking this huge chunk of the basement right here everything on this side went to the two sides where we really need dirt along with if you remember when we started this thing this kind of wedge here let me get a darker Sharpie I know this is turning into a disaster and I apologize but really remember we did this wedge here that got thrown out front here too right so we have this huge chunk along with this huge chunk has all gone to the areas where we really needed that dirt and so we've got just enough material on the other sides of the house that we can do our backfill but the majority of the balance is where we need it and again because we plan this from the get-go and we only excavated this part that means that I get to end my dig with one closeout hole and the way we're going to finish that is if you can imagine my machine is going to be sitting kind of here and I'm tracking backwards because we have to account remember we have to account for the over dig so I'm going to be off of my line a little bit and then when I get to the point where my machine is square on this line and it's Square on this line again accounting for the over dig I'm actually going to establish a solid line This Way along with the line this way and that way once I've dug everything up to the machine I can kind of pull off to the side here and we're going to have one close out and so I can finish out I can get myself lined up to where I can pull this clean and then I can track myself back over here to the side and I can pull this clean and you're going to end with a pretty tight corner here nice and tidy and all of the material is exactly where you need it to be so that is how I know that was pretty lengthy and I know we got really really messy on our paper here but that is how I approach a basement dig it's not that difficult it's intimidating the first time you walk up to it but with just a little bit of planning and having done it a couple of times very quickly you'll discover there's really not anything to it it just takes a second or two to think about really where do we want the material to end up and where do I want to finish out and just make sure that you're not going to dig yourself into a situation to where like I said if we go back here if we over dig one of these Corners now all of a sudden I don't have anywhere to sit with my excavator that's the only way you can really get yourself into some trouble in a basement is if you dig yourself into a situation to where you have no place to sit Square to the hole and you're having to do some really funky digging so as always I hope this helps and uh and feel free to reach out with any comments or questions we'll catch you guys on the next down and dirty

Channel: Diesel and Iron

Views: 35,464

Keywords: how to dig a basement, how to dig a basement under a house, how to dig a basement foundation, how to dig a basement with an excavator, how to dig a basement in michigan, how to dig a basement in the north, how to dig a basement in the midwest, diy basement dig, basement dig out, how to dig a basement new construction, construction of house basement, building a house basement, basement digging equipment, digging a basement under my house, digging a basement with a mini excavator

Id: 3Zg_cMQDVDw

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 02 2023