| We are fortunate in that there is not a lot of grading to prepare a pad for our house, since the ground where we chose to site the house is already nearly level.
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| The excavator and dozer scraped off the top soil and set it aside to replace when construction was finished. |
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| They cleared brush and graded the land for a driveway. The soil is a wild mixture of whatever the glacier left behind. This particular part is clay mixed with sand. In other areas it is like dried silt from a muddy stream bed. When it is wet it is slimy and squooshy, when it is dry it cakes as hard as a rock. However, when the dozer digs up the dry ground, the resulting "glacial flour" is so fine that when you walk on it, your feet sink down six inches or a foot. |
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| Our house will have only a crawl space beneath the house. The first floor will be only slightly above the natural grade of the land. However, the foundation walls extend two feet into the ground, where they rest on footings that are a foot or so wide and 8 or more inches deep. So, to give the concrete contractor room to build forms for all of this concrete, the original excavation extends between two and three feet below grade. |
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| The excavation is also wide enough to give the concrete people about 10 feet all around the edge of the foundation for working area. |
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| In the area that is to be the garage, the excavator only dug a wide trench to allow the footings to be built. That's because the garage floor slab will be poured close to ground level. |
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