Shoring and Stepped Footings and Foundation

As we dug deeper, we needed to figure out how to temporarily support the house. We had some steel beams that had been used to stiffen the living room floor system.

First we bolted a long LVL beam to the side of the house at the second floor level. The end wall of the house had been broken by the chimney. This beam tied the house together, as well as gave us something sound to shore up. The beam was sized such that it could be cut in two and re-used in the floor framing of the addition.

Next, we picked the two points we wanted to shore up, and Craig dug two holes as deep as the excavator would reach. James mixed up many bags of concrete in the wheel barrow and dumped them into the bottoms of the holes for temporary footings. Once the concrete had set up, Bill spiked together some 2x10's salvaged from the living room floor system and set them on one footing and shimmed it tight to the beam bolted to the house.

On the other footing, we set a 6x6 timber on top of which we placed one of the salvaged steel beams. It bridged to undisturbed soil behind the house. Approximately mid span of it, we placed a jack post which ran from the beam up to a 2x10 we'd bolted to the second floor level across the back of the house.

Now all we had to do was dig to our footings which were calculated to be below our basement slab level.