I’m about to begin an addition to a house built in 1920. The plans call for a full basement under the addition. The foundation of the house is block but only 9 courses high. The basement of the addition is to have an 8′ ceiling height and will be unfinished. I’m looking for suggestions on how to deal with the exposed footing of the house and the roughly 2′ of elevation change between the two basement floors. My gut instinct tells me I need to pour a reinforced concrete wall along the exposed footer to hold back the soil under it as well as the prevent the footer from falling/ pushing into the new basement. Any suggestions would be great appreciated.
Bill
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Greetings Billy, as a first time poster Welcome to Breaktime.
This post, in response to your question, will bump the thread through the 'recent discussion' listing again.
Perhaps it will catch someones attention that can help you with advice.
Cheers
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Hello Billy,
I'm not a foundation expert by any means but we did the exact same thing to our house. We had an existing basement that was 2 to 3 feet shallower than our addition basement was to be.
We were originally planning on underpining the old footing; i.e. dig out the soil about 6-8 inches under the old footing and pour a new concrete footing underneath. Then pin them together. I could get more details if you wanted.
Well, when we started to dig down we found very good compacted soil underneath the old footings so the footing inspector suggested that instead of disturbing the soil by digging it out, we should just build a retaining wall to hold the soil in place under the existing footing. (exactly as you suggested)
Our only problem with doing this the whole length of the footing was that we had stairs coming down right next to that wall in the new part of the basement. The retaining wall was going to be in the way at the bottom portion of the stairs. So we ended up doing half and half. We built a retaining wall about 2/3's of the way, and dug out and underpined the last 1/3.
I've already posted a few pictures under a previous thread. Search under UBuildit and you should find it. Otherwise I could probably post a few pictures tomorrow.
It can be a little tricky but if you get the right people to do it, I think it can work out! Good luck!
You don't have an engineer involved in this?
Here's few pictures of our project including the foundation plan. By the way, we had an architect involved from the beginning.
Thanks so much for the info and the pictures. In an attempt to keep the original posting short I left out that the owner hired an architect who produced drawing two years ago. The original plans called for a crawl space but the owner now wants a full basement. I think I will try to contact the architect or an engineer to develope a plan to address this exposed footer. The rest of the job is very straight forward. The guys at the permitting office didn't have any problem with me amending the plans to reflect the change to a full basement; I was trying to avoid the additional step. Your info has helped me make up my mind