Foundation repair

Once we have cleaned out the trench along the East side of the house, from the corner all the way to the fence, we can see that the house is not sitting on rock, but on rock on dirt on rock on dirt on rock.  And there are many tree roots going into the dirt under the foundation.  This seems to be just inviting trouble, so we would like to seal off the foundation.

We first clean out as much of the dirt and loose rock as we can.  Then we fill that space with cement.  To facilitate getting the cement in and holding it there, we use our standard cement forms, held about 4 inches away from the foundation, so we can pour the cement into the 4 inch space between the foundation and the forms.

This gets us partway around the house, then there is the area by the kitchen bay window.

 We do the same with that part -- creating a form and filling the area with concrete.

 And on around to the gate in the fence, first the forms.

  

and then the cement.

In all this took 72 bags of Quikrete.   At $3.10 per bag (plus tax) is $241.61.

We hope that this will seal off the foundation, making it stable.

 The cement did the main job of sealing the foundation, but notice that at the top, there were issues of trying to get the cement to seal up with the existing foundation.  Once the cement was poured, we then went back with just pure mortar mix and slathered on a layer of mortar to finish off the top of the cement and the existing foundation siding.