How To Lay Out A Foundation

Hey there, welcome to the Perkins Builder Brothers YouTube channel. Make sure to subscribe and check out our awesome online store where you get cool merchandise and we get money to feed our kids. Nailed it! Hey guys, Eric Perkins here. I'm a custom home builder and today I'm going to be showing you how to lay out a simple foundation using reference pins. And if you don't know what a reference pin is, that's okay, I'm going to show you. But basically it's a replacement for using a batter board and this works really well on a flat piece of ground or a simpler foundation where you don't really need all the features of a batter board. And once again, this is how my dad taught me how to do this when we were building simple houses with simple tools back in the 90s. Speaking of my dad, and I've mentioned him in a lot of videos, here he is. He just rolled by our job site and he's been out paddle boarding on the lake and we're right near the lake. So this is the guy. This is the guy that taught us all the simple cool ways to do stuff. How'd we do dad? Looks good. I don't see anything wrong with that. That's a good answer. I like that. Today we're going to be laying out the center section of this home, which has a basement. This is a home that we designed. Actually, I designed it on my computer at home in the living room with the kids screaming in the background, which made it even better. So let's take a walk over here and check out the basement excavation. So here you can see we have a giant hole in the ground. This basement is cut in and it's about three feet wider in each direction than the actual basement itself. And that's so that we have room to get around the back of this basement wall once it's completed to waterproof it and put on our French drain. Here's a quick look at the tools and supplies we're going to be using. We have a set of plans from my computer, tape measures, a long tape measure if your house is more than 25 feet in any direction. We have string line, which is regular Mason's line. Marking paint for marking like soccer fields. We're going to use that. We have rebar caps for safety. And these are some number four rebar. They're 24 inches long. That's all we'll need. And a sledgehammer probably. Rebar will make you super dirty, so wear gloves. First, we measure to find the center point of this basement cut. Next, we'll lay out the back wall. It's 30 feet long and we'll set it three feet from the bank so we can get behind it later. I'll set one pin, then we'll measure over and set the other pin. As a note, I am referencing the outside of these pins since they are a half inch thick and that thickness does make a difference. Next, we pull tapes to find a front corner of this foundation. We'll pull a straight measurement and a diagonal measurement, which I've figured on the plan to find this corner and keep it square to the back two points. This diagonal could be figured using the Pythagorean theorem a squared plus b squared equals c squared. And it's always a good idea to double check all your measurements because once you dig the footers, that's the shape of your house. Okay, let's chat for a second. We've got our four corners established. The only problem is when we go to dig the footers, those four pins are going to get dug up because they're in the actual footer. So here comes the purpose of these reference pins is it gives us a way to get our string lines and our corners reestablished. Once we've dug the footers, it gives us a way to line it all back up and get it back where it's supposed to be. So basically, all we're going to do is use a string line pulled between the two corners we now have. We're just going to run it past an extra three feet and set a pin in line. This way, when we hook around these new pins, it will form a cross right where the original pin was. I do this in both directions on all four corners so that we can string out the entire outside of the foundation once the footers are dug. It is important to drive these stakes as plumb as you can to keep them accurate. I also like to drive them down low enough to where the track hook can drive right over them without interfering. And it is hot out here, guys. We've got this reference pin set up and they are set three feet outside of the actual corners of the foundation. Okay, next step here is we're wrapping a string line around the outside corner of all these original pins and connecting them, making sure that the string line doesn't touch the ground anywhere so it stays nice and straight. Okay, we've got this string line now and this represents the outside of our house. What we're going to do is dig a two foot wide footer with our two foot track hoe bucket. We want this eight inch wall to be centered on that footer when we're done. So we're going to mark eight inches to the outside of the string line and 16 inches to the inside of the string line and that will actually center the wall on the footer and then we'll dig it. Now that that's done, we've got a nice outline that our machine operator can follow with his bucket to dig these footers straight. And here's our laser level. I'll explain how to use this in another video. We're going to use this to check out how level the ground is. We're going to find the low point and make sure our footers are dug at least eight inches below that low point. Along any edges where we're not backfilling, the bottom of the footer has to be at least a foot below grade. All right, we found our low point in this back section of footers is 16 inches the way we just shot it. We're going to drop eight inches from that to 24 for the bottom of our footers here. So I've got a grade pole here. I'm going to mark 24 and set up my receiver for this laser right on 24 inches. Now we can just dig down until this thing beeps and tells us we're at the right height. And it's actually pretty crucial to get these footers flat on the bottom so that you don't waste a bunch of concrete by having deep spots. Important step here before we move our laser that's set up here, I'm going to go ahead and move my receiver down eight inches. I'm just going to mark it on there. And we're going to go ahead and set a pin in each corner like a reference pin. And that's going to be the top height of the concrete at eight inches deep in this footer. So I'm going to move this down, lock it on, and we're going to beat this down. You'll notice they have this clamped on a level, and that's on purpose because I like to use this bubble so that I know if I'm plumb or not. And that makes a big difference in reading the height. All right, guys, we've got our footers dug, boom, right here. And we've got our string lines run back to our reference pins here and here. And you'll see that when you run them, we get this point here where they cross. And that's the actual outside of the foundation of the house, which is what we want to get back and mark it on the concrete once the footers are poured. We'll also use this string line to reference when we tie our J bars in from our steel that's going to go in the footer before we put the concrete in. Now we have a line to reference where those go. So that works really well, and that's a wrap. Okay, we're back here on the job a couple days later. You can see we've got our concrete poured. We've got our J bars put in, and we reference these lines. We've got our string lines hooked to our reference pins. Now, since I've got them at about eight inches off the concrete, I can just set a block in here to find the corner of the foundation, and I'll stick a nail in to mark it. You can see how well this works with these reference pins, how we've got our string lines and our corners ready to establish back on the concrete. So that's another foundation ready to go. All right, guys, thanks for watching our video today. I hope you learned something. We're going to take a nice, relaxing sit down on this awesome track hoe. Good job, AJ. We'll catch you later. That's a wrap.