The Foundation Needs to be Replaced

It isn’t the news anyone is excited to hear, but foundations can’t be fully assessed until they’re exposed.

The new house has a larger footprint but the engineer expected the existing foundation to be usable and simply augmented where the new house would stretch beyond the limits of the old. Once the structure was completely removed and the state of the block foundation could be seen, it was clearly unsound and needed to be completely scrapped. Wood Excavation stuck around to dig out the old foundation and remove all the concrete from the site.

An interesting feature of some Tahoe foundations – they sometimes include giant granite boulders. Some boulders are way too big to remove so they’re integrated when the foundation is poured, which was the case with the existing house on the site. The boulder is just touching the corner of the future house so it’ll be integrated again as part of the new foundation.

In this photo series you’ll see the rest of the house demolition, (interrupted momentarily by a busted hydraulic line) and the lot returned all the way to bare dirt.