Laying Out and Digging Footings for a House | Building The Nantahala Retreat #1

[Music] so this is it the nana nanahala retreat we are secluded on a ridge here with huge views of the national park and the national forest i hate to be that guy but somebody's gonna put a house right here we're gonna do it it's gonna be an amazing place to come do all kinds of outdoor activities when we're done with it here's the machine we're going to be using to dig the footings it's a kubota 35 from hampton equipment rental in franklin north carolina this thing is 8 200 pounds has a 2 foot wide bucket and has a maximum digging depth of 10 feet hopefully we don't have to dig them that deep if we do that's a bad start the only thing we're going to try to actually do today is just scrub the vegetation off the site so we can pull string lines and tape measures easily without getting snagged and if you're watching mom sorry it's like 100 feet off the side if i run this thing off the edge [Music] the home we're going to be building here is three floors including the basement and aloft with the master bedroom on the main level and it's about 1950 square feet including the partially finished basement as opposed to the structure of the last job which had free spanning trusses this is all stick framed with load-bearing posts that means the weight of the ridge beam and all of the roof and all the floor systems will come down in posts that eventually lead all the way to the ground the footings and that will hold the house up this home of course also features tons of outdoor living space including two large porches one of them covered all of them with amazing views [Music] you gonna operate this thing okay i got my license oh your license my brother and i have been building houses in these mountains for over 20 years now and this is our third start to finish build series on youtube make sure to check out our playlist to see the other ones and make sure to subscribe if you haven't other than that sit back relax and enjoy watching us build this house [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're at the entrance to the nantahala gorge and i'm the only person who knows how to get there so guess what we got jennings with our stuff we got my brother we got ray and jay and i'm gonna lead the caravan so i'm the only one who knows how to get there you ready yeah i'm ready all right let's go hey we're gonna have to do that caravan thing every day there ain't no way we're gonna remember how to get up here okay i feel like we're out in a jungle you know what look down there look at the the leaves and the trees this reminds me of the original king kong movie you know what i mean we're in the jungle yeah we're out there just like that in case you haven't watched any of our videos before i'm sorry if you haven't but let's introduce the crew who we got building this house out here got my brother jamie what's up from bryson city north carolina raymond jones from i don't know where you're from jason ellis from florida not really from florida no illinois okay i'm eric perkins and we got who's this who are you micah oh that's micah mr micah okay and and not here today is arlo of course the wizard he's coming shortly and uh jono one thing about these mountain job sites is space is at a premium like flat space i'm talking about the parking area is tight when you have a bunch of vehicles and the area where the house has to go is just barely big enough for the house we designed it a little smaller at first but it didn't have everything the homeowner wanted in it so we pushed it out and and today we're going to make sure we can get it on solid ground if you didn't know you can't build a house on fill dirt unless it's compacted properly which this isn't if there is any fill dirt here so we're going to situate this home to where we have the maximum amount of original soil under the footings and we still may get off the sides a little bit with the front corners we're going to try to avoid that like the plague because there are houses in this area they're just sliding off the side of the mountain tons of them because people didn't think oh we shouldn't build this on phil dirk so that's our first step is to just situate the house in the best place possible [Music] after removing a little bit of loose dirt from this bank it's time to actually lay out the house on the site with some string line and pins and there's three main things we're going to take into account here number one the view how do we orient the house to take maximum advantage of this awesome view number two all of the corners of this house need to be square meaning they're actually 90 degrees not less or more and number three we need a good way to recreate this setup once the concrete footings are poured so that we can get the corners back on those footings exactly where we laid it out to start with to do that we're going to use string lines and we're going to put these reference pins way outside the actual structure so we can hook these string lines back and where they cross is going to be the actual corner of the house back on the footings if this were a much larger or a very complicated structure or just a structure that was off a huge embankment and had a huge slope change we would have to use batter boards or even possibly call in a surveying company that would use gps to pin the corners of the structure because when you add in the slope it makes things a lot more difficult to square up one thing that's really messed me up a couple times in the past is using one of these long tapes that has an engineer scale on one side and feet in inches on the other and if you're not paying attention you can guess what will happen so the string lines we pulled here actually represent the outside of the structure not the outside of the footings so we need to mark where the actual footings go on the ground with some marking paint we have a two foot bucket we have an eight inch block wall so we want to mark eight inches outside the line and then 16 inches inside the line that will center the block wall on top of the footing stealing my shot bro dude get out of there you can get it from mine let's record my phone this video was made possible by hellofresh america's number one meal kit hella fresh makes cooking at home fun and easy and affordable hellofresh offers so many recipes to choose from each week to help you break out from your recipe rut and the produce gets you faster than from a grocery store not only that you can save up to 28 by using hellofresh versus grocery store shopping and you don't have to go to the grocery store there are pre-portioned ingredients meaning there's less prep and less food waste hellofresh gives you options to easily change your delivery days or food preferences and skip a week whenever you need and hellofresh has donated over 4 million meals to charity in 2020 and is continuing to step up their food donations amid the coronavirus crisis i actually enjoy their vegetarian options so that i avoid eating meat every single meal go to hellofresh.com and use my code 12 perkins to get 12 free meals including free shipping that's 12 free meals at hellofresh.com promo code 12 perkins [Music] our last bit of layout here is to mark out the footings for the 10 porch posts i like to actually mark the post on the ground and then mark the footing around that so i make sure the footing is centered on where the post is going to be that's not as easy as you would think next we go around and mark the inside and the outside of the perimeter of the rest of the footing because i'll mess up at least one of these lines with the trackhoe track next we set up our laser level and that's to shoot great on this entire flat area we're gonna find the low point and then reference that as the high point for the top of our footings so the top of the footings don't run out of the ground so 210 was our low point 210 and we need to go eight inches down so we need to go three six on the stick and that'll be the bottom of the footings matt doesn't lie at this point we can get rid of all the string lines and get them out of the way we will leave the pins and hook the string lines back to them later but for now it's time to dig see that yeah we have a no reuse string policy what we get to use a new one every time this is about 10 cents worth of string yeah i'm gonna pay you about five dollars by the time you get it unrolled one time to reuse it wow does jamie know about this rule it's gonna get trashed every time okay i don't care if we use that whole five dollar roll on this one house the thing is you heard that right this will only last this roll and then he'll forget to buy it the next time and then we'll have to go in the woods looking for more string you want to run down to mcdonald's let's grab some lunch down to like 40 minutes away dude we go to mcdonald's i'm going home all right we'll be back until tomorrow [Music] the process of digging these footings is pretty simple really i'm operating the machine i've got ray as my stick guy that means he's using a great stick with a laser reader clamped to it to keep me running on an even grade at the right depth so i don't go up and down jason is helping me guide the bucket because i can't see and i'm not an expert operator on this machine i do it about once every six months just enough to be dangerous when you're operating a machine like this it feels like you have all the power in the world at your fingertips until you hit some rock and then it feels like it won't do anything and this isn't even really hard rock like granite here this is sort of like a sandstone and it can literally stop you in your tracks if you hit something like this [Music] luckily this rock wasn't everywhere in the footings i was able to chip through it after about 10 minutes and keep moving [Music] the footings on the back of the structure are going to get about seven feet of backfill put on top of them it's a basement but around the front where there's no backfill we have to dig a little deeper there's a code minimum of 12 inches below grade for the frost line so we actually dropped the reader on the stick and went down 14 inches on this whole front section to meet that code last we tackled the footings for the porch posts and i was able to discard most of the dirt off the side of this bank saving us some work later [Music] let me get this straight i i messed up the mark right yeah yeah and then you remarked it yeah and then raid through dirt all over it again yeah i mean you might have to just take that little bit more out there's like six inches of uh bill's goal all right it's pretty easy to dig a giant hole with a machine like this but on these porch footings we don't want giant holes we want about a two by two footing if we make it any bigger we're just pouring extra concrete in the ground that's going to get covered up and we have to pay for it so the trick is to dig the bucket straight down and then curl it up towards the machine and then lift it straight up out of the hole jason was helping me with this and he's got these hand signals that i don't even know what they mean but he thought he was getting it done right yo that's good jones can take the rest out all right so it's a dirt proof sock technique yeah does it work what do you think that one looks cool it looks cool i guess i'm cab trying not to look we saved our most questionable footing for last and indeed this thing was on fill dirt and a lot of it you can see by jason's probing here it's not very solid [Music] i mean i think that's the original puzzle right there see that and see how it takes his color but how'd you get down in there oh yeah there we go let's go to get that loose stuff out that's it imagine the whole house is like this spiderman something i usually try to do well before we start the job is put in the temporary power pole but we were working full time about an hour from this job site so i didn't get around to it so today's the day with a machine though it wasn't bad we were able to dig a hole stick it in for underground temporary power and then we were even able to put the ground rod in with the machine so that was great [Music] with a little bit of time still left in the day we reset our laser and we reset the reader for our laser on the grade stick to reference the top height of where we wanted the footings to be so we could set the grade stakes [Music] pro tip of the day is to take your time doing this and don't hit the great stakes too deep to start with 5 8 down [Music] one half dude that's like the same height as that one three-eighths down [Music] one-quarter down he's playing it safe folks he's not going to make the same mistake twice one-eighth down shut up jones still down 1 8 playing it super safe it's not even moving it is moving down 1 8. well if you tell me it's too low it's like the same height as that one all right down 0 8 congratulations that's good you know what mountain that is way up there it looks just like a hump conti lacaunt that's a good guess that's a great guess that's a real mountain that's uh klingman's dome is that a mountain or it is it's like the second highest point in the eastern united states yeah but is it clingmans dome mountain no just klingman's dome is instead of mountain well you said name the mountain name okay did he not say name the mountain i'm not getting into it [Music] [Music] oh you

Channel: Perkins Builder Brothers

Views: 528,557

Keywords: Building, Construction, Footings, Layout, square, House, How To, start, dig, prep, Footer

Id: PELEBbcKbx4

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021