Day Four, Tuesday the 14th

We passed our footer inspection this morning.  Of course, it was raining today and there is rain the forecast for tomorrow, so I'm hoping to pour the footers on Friday.  The footers are essentially the base of the entire house.  In this case they are 18 inches wide and 12" deep; we have about 45' linear feet of footers to pour along the front of the house.  In addition, at the same time I will pour what is called a "monolithic slab" to form the floor of the cistern/root cellar.  The slab will be 12 inches thick throughout and will act as one large footer to support both the weight of the house along the perimeter as well as the weight of the water.  In this case, I am more concerned about supporting the water weight as opposed to the weight of the house.  Assuming the cistern holds 4000 gallons that will be about 32,000 pounds of water, distributed over an area of about 90 sq.ft.  In other words, about 355 lbs./sq.ft.  Not that much, everything considered, but still I wanted to make the slab as thick as possible to resist any potential cracking.  To further address this issue, the slab and footers will be reinforced with 1/2 rebar as well as being poured with fiber-reinforced concrete; the fibers help to prevent micro-cracking.

     Once the footers are poured I will be able to work on forming up the foundation walls over the weekend and hopefully should begin pouring those next week.  The foundation will be built from two pours so the concrete will have built-in control joints where needed.  I decided to pour the whole foundation (as opposed to using concrete block) for two reasons:

1)The concrete block and masonry joints are more porous and weaker than a poured wall, both of which are important for the cistern.

2)On the upper section of the house the new footers intersect with the old footers at the corners and the poured foundation will be stronger than a block wall in case of uneven footer settling.

No pictures for today, although most of the sheetrock is down in the back half of the house.  I will finish tearing down sheetrock tomorrow and built my temporary walls to support the back section of the roof so I can take down the two exterior walls and build the new ones.  This way I should be able to leave the majority of the old roof on (which is good, considering the rain we've been getting) until the new roof is ready to go on; the new roof will literally be built over top of the old one.