Our old house has a pier and beam foundation, and we're putting in kind of a modified version (I'm not really sure what it's called) for the new addition. Here's why:
So, the Houston visitor's bureau tells the casual reader that the noble founders of the city of Houston were "John K. Allen, a shopkeeper and dreamer, and his brother Augustus, a bookkeeper and a pragmatist." As with all things Houston, the story is a little shadier than that. Any Houstonian who's stepped outside into a 100 degree day with 98% humidity in August knows that whoever first convinced people that this was a good spot to buy land had to be a crook. And while the official stories will always gloss over the parts that might make our founders look less than venerable, it is clear that they bought the 6,000 some-odd acres of Houston because they were asked to stop being pirates by running blockades for the Texans during the Republic's war for independence. Pirates! Their land speculation also bordered on piracy--they sold the 1,000 acres of my neighborhood to the developers for $45 an acre after having bought it for $1 an acre. How did they command so much? My neighborhood is a nice little high spot just north of downtown, it's true, but rumor says that the Allen Brothers flat-out lied about the beauty and productiveness of this land, saying it was seaside (the Gulf is 45 miles away), declaring the beauty of the waterfalls (waterfalls?!) to still the soul, and gushing over the fertility of the land. Let me tell you about the land.
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| Does this look fertile to you? |
This is some dirt in my yard. Before we started construction, some guys came to get a core sample of about 20 feet of dirt in our lot. They discovered that we had white clay, red clay, grey clay, water, and black "gumbo"clay. For 20 feet down. That's Houston for you--we are the bottomland of the whole Western half of the country. We are the swamp that the Rocky Mountains have drained into for zillions of years, and all the teeny particle bits of the whole country are gathered in my backyard. Which makes it not only NOT fertile, despite the Allen Brothers' claims, but also sort of not great for building houses on. As my very rudimentary understanding has it, anything you put into the ground is likely to get waterlogged, and when the ground dries up, it gets as inflexible as kiln-dried pottery and shifts. Add to that that Houston is lousy with faults, and it becomes necessary to get a little creative with foundations.
Last weekend, these exciting guys were stacked in what's left of our driveway. Oh, yeah. THAT is some building material, there. Then, on Monday, the kids and I stopped by and got to witness some excitement.
It's hard to know, isn't it, if cement trucks are awesomer than backhoes?
Sometime Monday morning, they came by with a giant auger and drilled 10-foot deep holes where our new piers will be. Sadly, I missed that, and sadly, I couldn't see to the bottom of the holes to check out how they're belled at the bottom, but nonetheless, giant holes are cool. Then they put some of that fancy rebar in there and filled them up with cement.
That left us with a nice little grid of reinforced concrete piers. The next day was possibly even better--they built the frame-thingy for pouring the bulk of the slab, and now I can see the footprint of the new part of my house.
I'd have to figure out a way to get arial shots to give you the best impression, but I get to sneak in after everyone's done working and walk around imagining my new house where it's actually going to be. This was Tuesday morning, and then I caught a cold and felt dreadful for a few days. Fortunately for our house, I'm not in charge of actually accomplishing anything, and shockingly, the work continued without my constant snooping.
My six-year-old got into the act and nice pier-and-beam-ish foundation himself.
They trucked in some more fill dirt (something that magically helps offset all the clay a little, though I don't know how) and ran the bobcat over it to pack it tight.
The plumbers came by and set up some stuff. I think those are mostly waste and vent lines, but I don't really know. One is about where the master bathroom will be, one is near the kitchen sink, and one is right there at the guest bath. Those three little pipes in the middle, though? I don't know what they're for (gas supply?), but that's where my kitchen island is going to be. That's my actual kitchen island. A real one. It exists, if only in pipe and dirt. That's even better than cement trucks.
They're going to reinforce the beams with, you guessed it, more rebar. I can't wait.
Not being a structural engineer, I only have the most basic understanding of all this stuff, and I'm grateful to our architect's neat plans and the concrete foreman's explanation to know even what's going on so far. I do know that Houston is stuffed with horror stories of houses splitting in half down the middle, I've seen egregious cracks in houses and slabs all over town, and I know that I had gotten used to not being able to actually close the bathroom door during the drought a few summers ago because the house had shifted so much (We had wall cracks, too. I'm now a master spackler.). I'm glad that folks have a way of making Houston livable and my house safe, since I've chosen to live in it forever. And if you think I can talk about foundations for a long time, just wait until we get to the hurricane clips.
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