Foundation / Discussions

...Foundations Better - which is Better for Cost and Durability? Can a basement be a good option for your home? The downside of a slab is that all your plumbing is embedded in concrete so it’s not conducive to making kitchen or bathroom modifications in the future. But if you build it properly and anticipate your future n...

My fiance and I are building our first home. We purchased some basic house plans that are designed for a slab on grade home. I am really leaning towards slab on grade for the aesthetics, savings, as well as for environmental reasons. I live in New England and our winters are consistently below freezing and our summers ...

Hi We are looking for admixture to prevent water wicking into concrete. Do you have any suggestions? Thank you! To be able to help you solve your problem we would need a bit more info.  Please let us know whether you are talking inside the house or outside, the current state of the basement, as in - is it finished or u...

...Foundation Insulation Detail, Prefab ICF Form Kits There is reason to be concerned that the slabs would settle and shift differently and potentially lead to structural failure if it isn’t done right, so you would really want it designed by a geotechnical soils engineer that specializes in this. I know that Legalett doe...

...foundation. Either lift it and build a cinderblock foundation and insulate it from the exterior (and the floor) or you could even drop it down on a radiant heated slab on grade and ditch the existing floor. That may be the most sensible option if you really want radiant infloor heating, though there are others we can d...

My 560 sq.ft. Knotty Pine Cabin sits on screw piles and rocks in high wind and a little during the stat of the spin cycle on the washing machine. Should I be concerned? Is this common? Hi Pamela, I'd certainly suggest you should investigate - is it the connection between the house and the screw piles that is loose? The...

The plans on my new house call for my footings to be 18 inches below the level of my basement floor. High water table and the engineer wanted the footings on undisturbed soil. So I basically need to pour my basement wall 18 inches higher then plan then fill the inside with crushed gravel and have my basement floor elev...

...foundation with a walk out basement. Legalett provides raft slabs which are engineered to spread the weight evenly, so the are much more solid and not prone to structural cracking like standard concrete slab floors. So, you could pour the slab then seat an ICF Foundation wall on it, leaving you with  a basement thoroug...

Hi, I recently purchased a newly-built ground floor condominium with an accessible crawlspace.  This is in Colorado, dry climate, cold winters.  The walls of the crawlspace are insulated and the dirt floor is sealed with a vapor barrior, but my indoor floors felt cold this last winter, making my whole living space cold...

Building a new raised bungalow in Ontario. Basement will have 9' ceilings, 5 ' concrete wall and 4' knee wall built with 2x6 and batt insulation r22. Should I run rigid insulation inside the foundation wall up the concrete and cover the knee wall as well? If so what product makes the most sense? Basements are more susc...

...Foundation and Basement; Which is Best? Is a finished basement worth the investment in a home? Part of the problem with calculating the cost difference between a basement and slab on grade is comparing them accurately. The numbers get skewed when you factor finished or unfinished basements, and what you calculate as th...

Rear porch was was enclosed. Framed walls, insulated and drywalled Crawl space has dirt floor, 3 cement block walls, open lattice wall to access crawl space, exposed floor joists 24'' o.c., height from ground to bottom of joists is 36" If you have a three-sided foundation wall with lattice work on one side and a dirt...

I have a home about 3000 sq.  the top is about 1700 and the rest in the basement, being a cinderblock home with a 2 foot over hang. I studed my inner wall, I put R13 fiberglass and sheet rock, then on the outside I tared the out side and filled most  of them with cement a few have insolation very few. Shoud I put styro...

...foundation is a much better idea if you can do it. Insulating the interior of a stone foundation can be risky due to the fact that that like a CMU or cinderblock foundation, they are not as strong as a poured concrete foundation and they rely only on the mortar between blocks and stones to hold them together, which are...

Be warned; this is a long post!  Apologies in advance. I live in the colder climate of western Massachusetts in an 1830s vintage home.  We have a 4'6" crawlspace (approximately 18' x 26') beneath our wood floored living room.  The house foundation is piled-up field stone (typical of that era) and it can be drafty in hi...

...foundation foam forms to get a quote for an addition in Michigan and keep reading about slab on grade and monolithic foundation styrofoam forms - is there a difference or are they the same thing?  A slab on grade literally means a slab of concrete on grade (ground level), as opposed to ‘below grade’ like a basement. An...

...Foundation made of CMUs (aka Cinder block foundations), are trickier to fix than poured concrete foundations. They are not nearly as strong since it is only the mortar between blocks that holds them together, so freezing can cause problems. We’ve yet to see one that really knocked it out of the park in terms of durabil...

...Foundation and Basement; Which is Best? There are some cases when a basement makes more sense, like urban infill lots with height restrictions, but even then we’d go with an ICF hybrid to avoid some hidden costs, see our page about raft slabs for poor soil quality here. But where near Portland, is it urban or country? ...