Construction starts

Finally, at the very end of May in 2006 we broke ground. The foundation for the main part of the house went quickly but the excavation under the large covered patio, garage, shop, and pool showed a sinuous vein of "expansive" clay which wound its way between every test pit the soils engineer dug. Tests showed the clay to be very weak and unable to provide support for a foundation. The typical solution to this type of problem is to excavate the clay several feet below the foundation (5-20') and replace the soil with compacted "engineered fill" (road base). The idea is to excavate down to a point where the moisture content is stable so that there is little change in soil volume due to moisture change.  In our case, the vein wound its way across the foundation in way that caused problems almost everywhere which would have required a massive amount of soil removal. Fortunately, our structural engineer has lots of experience with conditions like this and he came up with a solution that required a less, but still substantial, amount of fill. The problem has still caused a delay of a couple weeks and increased the cost of the foundation a significant amount. We have a large contingency fund built in to the construction estimate but I didn't expect to hit it so hard this early in the process.

The foundation for the main part of the house

800 cu yds of fill