Part VIII - Pouring the Footer

March, 2009

Because the cabin is built in two sections – one with very heavy cypress logs and the other with much lighter frame construction – I’m treating the foundations of the two separately.

The frame section will be something simple – likely pier and beam – and the log section will be concrete. This is particularly important in getting the logs off the ground to prevent rotting. In the old cabin, the logs were sitting on top of large stones that were likely dragged up from the creek. But these soon sank into the dirt and the very bottom log on the back side was thus lowered to the ground, allowing it to rot away to almost nothing.

This is what produced the decided lean in the cabin seen here:


So the decision was made to pour a foundation. Because 100 percent of the weight will be on the outside wall, it was not necessary to pour a solid square foundation. Instead, I decided, upon the consultation with senior foreman Ray, to pour a footer instead.

Above is the prepared footer site, ready for the concrete. Notice the stones. These are the original foundation stones on which the cabin was sitting. I transported them at great expense of sweat (I put them on the truck by myself) to the new site, and tossed them into the shallow trench I dug for my footer.

We then built the frame to exact dimensions and added rebar, which in some cases is actual rebar, and in others is various scrap iron we found around the farm. Note the very long iron pipes. This gives a little extra stability across the length of each side. We only had three pipes available, so I pulled out the old metal detector, located an old water line (which we long since replaced with PVC), and dug up an intact and very strong old metal pipe, which it turns out was just the perfect length.

We do have a concrete mixer on the farm, but it’s an old one that is operated by a long belt attached to a 1940s John Deer Tractor. We no longer have the tractor (I should have chained myself to it when dad decided to sell it), nor do we have a belt, so it’s next to useless now.

However, we do have a bucket on the new John Deer Tractor, and in fact, that worked even better. We mixed the concrete in the bucket, and then delivered it precisely where we needed it to go. Some sloshed over our forms, but most of it made it in.

This gives us our footer, which will support the weight of the cabin and which will also raise its height enough off the ground to allow for a deck to be built in the breezeway and on the front, where the “porch” of sorts used to have a dirt floor.

This is the footer mostly complete: