Footings and Structural Rebar for a Basement Walkout Project in Herriman, Utah
Hey, it’s Caleb Dansie here with Dansie Design Build. Today I wanted to give you guys an update on our basement walkout project in Herriman. Here we have a client who’s looking to make a basement apartment for friends and family to live in, a secondary unit, or potentially have some secondary income in the future. So here, I want to show you guys what we’re doing. They have a pretty big RV pad and retaining walls that we have formed up and got the footings ready to pour tomorrow. Then also the structural reinforcing rebar, actual basement walkout, and the door.
Converting Basement to a Walkout Basement
So we have the house and the basement is the foundation. We’ve done a little bit of excavation, well, quite a bit, actually. We’ve got a mountain of dirt. Really fun. But anyway, here’s the walkout. We cut the window out and then turned it into a door. Cut the bottom part of the window out and we’ve left that four inches lower so when we pour our walkout landing, we’ll have fresh new concrete going underneath that threshold. So anyway, we’re going to have a drain here, lots of gravel. This is all getting back filled with gravel eventually, when we get done with the concrete work.
Basement Stairs
We’ve got the stairs marked out, each step, where they’re going to go. We’re getting this tar cleaned off the foundation and it’s coming off, actually, pretty well. Usually it isn’t this easy. I think it’s because it’s getting a little bit colder. We usually do this in the middle of summer so it’s nice to kind of do it in the fall. But either way it doesn’t matter. So we have our stairs coming up and ending at the top. That’s where the driveway or the RV pad elevation will be, is right there on that mark, and then stairs.
What is a Footing?
Then we have our rebar and footing forming. The footing basically holds the weight of everything above it. So here you can see this, the foundation is resting on the footing. If you’re not familiar with how footings work, it’s basically all the weight to the house comes down from the roof, through the wood framing, into the foundation wall, and then all bears down on the foundation.
Number Four Rebar for Footings
We’ve got our new foundations formed up. When they step down, the elevation’s going to change to step down to the lower level, matching what they did on the house, where it steps down. So we’re going to duplicate that same detail over here. Then our engineer has specified how much rebar to put in here. So there’s three number four rebars in here. And a number four rebar is four eighths of an inch or half of an inch. So we’ve got three number four rebars continuously through this whole footing.
Deadman Wall & Why You May Need One
Then we come to what we call a deadman wall, which basically, because this is a retaining wall, this ground elevation is going to maintain the same when we’re all done. This foundation wall is going to go up above the level of the fence. It’s going to be 12 feet tall, almost 13 feet tall by the time we get done with it. Then this is all going to be filled with gravel and all that weight would push the wall over. So what we’ve done, the engineers figured out, and this is pretty typical, but basically this footing is going to create such weight, it’ll be a retaining wall basically. So we’ll keep this main foundation wall from being able to pull out because this one here will be up and tied in, connected in a T form to keep it from falling over. So I got a lot of rebar here. That’s really exciting to see that much rebar.
Deadmen Walls for This Basement Walkout
We have another deadman there. The foundation continues out and then another deadman. We’ve got deadmen, every 10 feet. Then the elevation will go uphill. So what we’ve done is we’ve engineered some more steps to save some concrete. Each one of these is going to have a massive wall above it with a ton of steel rebar. Vertically though. So here we have another deadman. And then when we step up to this elevation, it’s a different detail, and it’s a smaller deadman, which is nice.
Rebar for the Foundation Walls
We’ve got our other rebar for the foundation walls delivered, on site, ready to go. All this is going to be a retaining wall that is a higher elevation than the existing grass. Same with back in the backyard of the house. Then the mountain of dirt’s going to go away and is going to be poured back with the concrete driveway, tying into the existing sidewalk and driveway. So there you go. Hope you guys enjoyed it. We’ll talk to you next time.
Does Your Basement Need Finished in Salt Lake County?
I hope you guys enjoyed seeing that and learned some things about how footings and foundations work, and retaining walls with the deadmen. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to us on our website, dansiedesignbuild.com and schedule a consultation. We can talk to you about your basement walkout, your basement finish, or what you’re looking to have done. Look forward to hearing from you.
