The life of any building directly depends on how well its foundation is flooded. Saving on this part of a country house is by no means impossible. The foundation should be filled only with the highest quality materials. Of course, one cannot violate the technology of erecting the foundation of a residential building. On how to fill the foundation under the house correctly, and we will talk further in the article.
Types of grounds
The foundations of the following types can be built under various kinds of buildings and structures:
Private houses, however, with their own hands in most cases are built only on the first three types of foundations. Installation of pile structures is carried out using special equipment. And they trust the construction of such grounds most often only to specialists.
The main elements of the columnar foundation are supports of circular or square section, buried in the ground and interconnected by a concrete, wooden or metal grillage. This type of foundation is the easiest to erect and the cheapest. However, pouring such foundations is allowed only under not too heavy buildings on strong soils. For example, a columnar supporting structure is the best answer to the question of how to fill the foundation under a wooden house.
Tape foundations for the owners of suburban areas are most popular. It is on such supporting structures that most often erect both one-story and two-, three-story private residential buildings. Such grounds are usually the best answer to the question of how to fill the foundation for an extension to the house with brick or concrete walls. Such structures are concrete tape buried in the ground.
Slab foundations are poured under buildings on unreliable soils in terms of movement. This type of construction is the most expensive. In addition, the construction of such a foundation is a very time-consuming procedure. The bases of this type are a solid slab, poured under the entire area of the house.
The main stages of installation
So, let's see how to fill the foundation under the house with your own hands. Installation of the foundations of buildings of any kind is carried out - tape, columnar, slab, in several stages. At the same time, the construction of foundations includes the following steps:
markup execution;
earthwork - digging a foundation pit, trench or pit, depending on the type of foundation;
backfilling of a sand pillow;
formwork assembly;
installation of reinforcing cage;
pouring concrete mixture.
The method of erecting a foundation does not in any way depend on the size of the building. Using the same technology, you can fill the foundation under the house 8x8, 10x15, 3x10 m, etc.
Where to begin
Before starting the construction of the foundation, the construction site, of course, should first be cleaned of debris, grass, bushes, etc. It must also be leveled. Those owners of suburban areas who wondered about how to fill the foundation under the house with their own hands, among other things, should familiarize themselves with the technology of marking for such a design.
You need to approach this procedure as responsibly as possible. A house with crooked corners will look, of course, ugly and messy. At the same time, the life of the building will also decrease.
How to make markup correctly
This operation is usually performed using a cord and pegs. The corners are aligned in most cases by the method of the Egyptian triangle. Wherein:
4 knots are tied on a long rope (the first is at the very end, the second is 3 meters from it, the third is 4 meters from the second and the fourth is 5 meters from the third);
the first and last nodes are connected with a nail;
they drive a nail into each intermediate node;
drive pegs along the line of the wall;
stretch the rope triangle, placing its long side between the pegs;
perpendicular is drawn along the short side;
set the third and fourth pegs in the corners.
At the final stage, the evenness of the corners is checked by stretching the rope diagonals in the resulting rectangle and measuring each segment of them.
Excavation
Manually dig a trench under the strip foundation, as well as pits under the column supports. To equip the pit of the slab base, they usually hire special equipment. The first two varieties of foundations, when erected with their own hands, are buried in the ground by about 70-80 cm. The foundation pit for a slab base is usually made smaller - about 40 cm.
At the end of the excavation, the bottom of the trench and pits are leveled. Next, a sand cushion is poured with tamping. Use well-sifted sand for this. The pillow under the foundation of the house will subsequently play the role of a shock absorber in spring heaving.
Formwork assembly
Concrete is poured during the construction of the foundation in a special form, mounted most often from wooden panels. To assemble the formwork of the tape base, an edged board with a thickness of at least 2.5 cm is used. The panels are mounted as follows:
Install shields in the trench using struts, struts and wire ties. Formwork for slab foundations is done in approximately the same way.
Molds for pouring supports of columnar foundations of square cross section can also be made of boards. Sometimes thick tin is also used for this purpose. For round pillars of such foundations, formwork is usually made of roofing material. This material is simply rolled up with a “pipe” and installed in pits. For a concrete grillage of a columnar foundation, formwork is assembled from wooden panels.
How to pour the foundation under the house: installing a reinforcing cage
For tape and slab foundations during the construction of low-rise buildings, a two- or three-row stiffening frame is most often used. In any case, reinforcing the foundations of the rear is mandatory. A feature of concrete is that it has a very high compressive strength. With expansion, this material, unfortunately, easily crumbles. To some extent, this shortcoming can be corrected by installing the frame.
They knit a reinforcing reinforcing structure during the construction of foundations with their own hands using a metal rod. Welding to assemble the frame is not used. The reinforcement made in this way subsequently begins to rust quickly at the joints. Assemble metal frames for foundations in most cases using knitting wire.
Moreover, for the main load-bearing elements of reinforcing structures, a rod with a diameter of 8 mm is most often used. Intermediates are made of 6 mm reinforcement.
To install a do-it-yourself frame in the formwork, of course, also needs to be done correctly. Ultimately, it should be completely located in the thickness of concrete. Reinforcing frames are therefore installed, usually in a trench or in a pit, on 5 cm thick blocks or on special plastic supports.
The reinforcement is positioned so that the distance from it to the walls of the formwork is also 5 cm. It should not reach the same 5 cm to the edge of the form of the frame and in height.
The grillage of the columnar foundation is reinforced in exactly the same way. At the same time, the supports of such bases are strengthened with frames made of 4 rods. Such reinforcement is located in the center of the pit indented from the edges. At the end of the filling of the column, the frame rods should protrude 20 cm above its surface. This is necessary for a bunch of reinforcing supports and grillage.
How to fill the foundation under the house with your own hands: preparing concrete
Cement mortar for pouring the supporting structure of the building is best done in a concrete mixer. When using such equipment, the mixture turns out to be as homogeneous as possible, which positively affects the quality of the erected base. If there is no concrete mixer on the farm, you can make a solution in a large trough. In this case:
The finished solution should not drain off the shovel or crumble into pieces. Cement in the construction of the foundations of houses usually use brands no lower than M400. Sand for this purpose is supposed to be used river, large, well sifted.
Crushed stone in a cement mortar, designed to fill the foundations of buildings, use only solid, medium fractions. The mixture for the foundation is usually made in the proportion of cement / sand / crushed stone as 1/3/4.
How to lay concrete
Next, let's see, in fact, how to fill the foundation under the house with your own hands. When constructing the tape base manually, the mortar should be laid immediately in layers along the entire perimeter of the trench. Parts cannot be poured into the formwork. Otherwise, the foundation will subsequently turn out to be fragile. Supports of the columnar base are poured whole at a time.
Slab foundations are usually built with a slightly different technology. In this case, concrete is poured into the pit using special equipment. Manually this operation, of course, will be difficult to perform.
When pouring the foundation, they try, among other things, to ensure that no air bubbles remain inside the mixture. To do this, periodically tap the formwork walls with a hammer and pierce the solution with a shovel or rods.
The final stage
Thus, we found out how to fill the strip foundation under the house, columnar or slab. As you can see, the technology of erecting such structures is nothing particularly complicated. The formwork is removed from the foundation poured according to the method described above, usually on the second day. Then, for two weeks, the erected base of the house should stand under a plastic wrap. At the same time, foundation concrete is supposed to be sprayed with water twice a day. The use of this technology prevents the appearance of surface cracks on the walls of the flooded structure.
You can start building walls on the foundation no earlier than a month after pouring it. By this time, the concrete is ripening and the slab, tape or poles acquire maximum strength. Before the erection of walls, the foundations of houses are usually waterproofed with two layers of roofing material on bitumen mastic.
The method of pouring the foundation under the old building
Sometimes the foundation has to be erected under the house already on the site. The need for this may arise, for example, when the foundation under the building, in general, was not built. Sometimes you also have to change the old, collapsed support structure to a new one.
The answer to the question of how to fill the foundation under the old house, in principle, is simple. But the construction technology in this case should be followed exactly. Such a procedure is performed as follows:
2-3 metal beams are pushed under the house so that they extend beyond the wall plane by 0.5 m;
under each edge of the beams, jacks are installed on brick supports;
carefully and evenly raise the house 1 cm alternately with all the jacks;
in this way they raise the building to a height of 10 cm;
put some support under the house;
dismantle the old foundation.
This technology is the most common answer to the question of how to fill the foundation for a standing house. At the final stage, a foundation pit is dug under the building and a new supporting structure is erected using the technology described above in the article.