Godfrey Building Group

So work’s continuing on the garden suite, as David (founder and owner of New Urban Home Builders) continues construction on a garden suite for a Toronto family and their father.

As we said, the ground was a bit...strange. When he started digging, he saw that it had a tendency to turn into muddy puddles instead of draining. That could have made building a foundation extremely difficult! We’d talked with our expert soil engineer, who wasn't sure what was going on, and said that the only solution was incredibly expensive shoring around the foundation.

Helical piles were one solution, but they were also expensive, albeit not quite as bad.

So David reached out to the soil engineer again after a few days to get fresh eyes and a fresh perspective .With those fresh eyes, he got a fresh answer.

The answer was in some of the OTHER things he found in there when he started digging. Our expert contractors were finding huge rocks, tree stumps, and loads of other detritus that you wouldn’t expect to find buried under the ground!

When he looked into it, he discovered that the lot was at the bottom of a ravine, and there’d been frequent water flow (and outright dumping) that had deposited all that stuff in there. That’s why the site wasn’t draining properly: all that random stuff in there from decades of buildup was preventing it.

So there was only one thing to be done for it: DIG. And dig. And dig some more, getting it all out, until you get down to the soil underneath. Clean up all that nonsense, get rid of all the stumps and rocks and whatever else he found.

We found concrete!

We found a tree twelve feet down!

Then, when the digging was done, and our tireless workers had cleared out all the detritus, it was time to start actually building. David decided to use a raft slab. And what’s a raft slab? That’s what we’re talking about next…