Building A House Start to Finish | Episode 2: Pouring Footings and Laying Block

Welcome back to our second exciting episode on building a house start to finish our modern mountain getaway home here in Bryson City, North Carolina. Here's where we left you last time. We had just finished digging the footings so let's jump into the next phase. Today we'll be showing you the concrete pour as well as laying the block foundation and this block is merely a form for the slab and this is one way to do it. There's other ways we will discuss in the video. So this house is a modest house, modest budget, and that's part of the challenge here is to make it look awesome for that budget. We started our day by flagging down a concrete truck. He had driven right past us the first try and we got this big rig in. The concrete trucks are huge and we had pre-mapped out a route for him to get around this foundation. If you look closely, Chris is guarding our reference pin so it doesn't get knocked over. We really need that later. For these footings we're using a 3,000 psi concrete and right here he's rolling a little more water into the drum to get it to a 5 slump. It was a hot dry day and this stuff sets up quick in this kind of weather. We put the concrete in the footings to the top of our grade pegs that we had set the day before. This gives us a completely level surface at the top of our concrete to lay the block on. Once we had all the concrete placed we took a hand float and put a nice smooth finish on these footings so that we could snap lines and get our block laid really easily on the first row. Here's a look at our footings after we were done. Now remember this is going to be a slab and notice there's no steel sticking out of the footings. We'll talk about that more later. All right you guys remember those reference pins from the last episode? This is why we did it. We can now pull string lines back to make a corner and drop a plumb bob down to find the exact corner again except on top of the concrete footing. This is very important. Jason's rolling out our construction power cord here. We had this made up by an electrician and it's about 200 feet long so we can get power across a job site to wherever we need it. Unfortunately here we're running off a generator today. We did not get the power hooked up yet but that's coming soon. If you've ever seen a block job this is the first step. Spread some block out. We set these about 16 inches apart because that's how much space they take up on the ground. Next we fired up our trusty cobalt electric mixer. Now I know you're thinking this looks like a toy but for a foundation this size it does great. It's quiet and it's easy to clean and haul around so we love it for small jobs. All right time to get the mud rolling. Our mix ratio is two five gallon buckets of sand mixed with one half of an 80 pound bag of s-type mortar. That's about the maximum this little mixer will do at one time but like I said for a small job like this if you keep it rolling it will keep up with you. And as the mud was rolling we were also chalking lines on the footings. This gives us a nice reference as we lay the mud down on the footing exactly where to put it to get it under the block. And on a long run like this it's a great idea like Jason is doing to hold the chalk line down in the middle with your finger and then snap each side separately. That will give you a little bit more accurate of a line. As well as checking square with the numbers we also hold a big framing square down to check square on all of our corners. Doesn't hurt. Our first batch of mud was getting near ready but there's still one more step we always do and that's to recheck each corner of the footing to make sure that it's actually all the same height at each corner. To do this we use a laser and a reader and just go around to each corner checking the elevation. In this case there was only about a quarter inch variance on all the corners but that's enough to make a difference. We basically will make up the difference in our mud joints on the block so that at the top of the block the foundation is completely level even if the footing is off by just a fraction as it was. Time to break out the masonry box and try to dig through all this crap to find one trowel that's usable. It usually takes me a minute but I know it's in there somewhere. This is also the moment that we realized our wheelbarrow was shot. It'll make it through the day I guess. And finally by about 10 o'clock we were actually laying some corners. That's the first step in the block work is to lay the corners. Then you can use string blocks and string line to pull between the corners to get the rest of the row perfectly straight and level a lot faster and easier. You can see here that I'm laying down the mud for the first block. We have it oriented in a specific direction so that it'll work out without having to cut a block anywhere in the row. All right here's a good long stretch of video. Let's talk about this foundation in a little more detail and how it's going to work. As you can see I'm laying one row of regular eight inch block and on top of that I'm laying this special block called a header block. And you can see that the edge is cut off on one side. That's going to allow the concrete to flow in from the slab all the way down through both layers of block and lock them all together. That's why we don't need the steel sticking out of the footing. All this is going to be tied together by the slab in the end. Now we could have done this a totally different way called a monolithic pour where we pour the slab and the footings in one pour. But call me old school I just like doing it this way. We actually just use the block as the form for the slab and I don't know it's just the way I like to do it. As I'm laying the block I'm always checking the space remaining to make sure my last blocks are going to fit without cutting them. By about noon it was getting hot and getting a little weird. I can always tell when someone is from Florida. I guess he thought this was going to be a day on the beach. After the first row of block was down we dove right into the second row which goes right on top of the first row of course. And this is a little bit faster and easier but both of these rows, the first two rows are real back breakers. I was done by the end of the day. Here's a quick look at the block going in on the final row on one section. You can see that I'm using a string line and a string block to lay the block to. It's very important especially on the top row that this string line is pulled very very tight otherwise it will sag in the middle and this will cause a sag in your foundation, your wall, and your roof. It's very important to get it straight. I'm also using a third row of block to help hold that string block you can see on the right corner. That's so that I don't pull the block that I just laid loose from the wall. Ow! Getting old suck bub. I've got to throw this in here. If you're laying block on a hot day you have to add water to your mud pretty constantly to keep it at the right consistency. Here I'm chopping the water in so it goes all the way down through it and makes it nice and wet again. Here it is. A finished foundation ready for plumbing, gravel, and then a slab. This thing sticks about 10 inches to 12 inches out of the ground so that we can slope the ground up to it later. That's very important and that's why we needed to use block instead of just pouring concrete right on the ground. Like old Jamie Perkins says, that's one way to do it. Once the block was laid we decided it was time for a little adventure. We'd been eyeing this bus down lower on the property. Jono thought it might actually make a really cool camper if he could get it towed out of there and put on his property so he could fix it up. Only one way to find out if it's worth anything. Go get stung by some bees. Future home. That's a, uh, that's a bus all right. It's like a 57 Chevy he used to own. Oh dude! You can move in! Playboy back here. Hey, hey, huh? Huh? Comes with its own Playboy? No, it's been installed. Wow! Well, it's a pretty cool old bus but Jono decided it was a little more work than he was willing to put into it and I don't blame him. I called the homeowner and told her we checked it out and found a few interesting magazines. She said we were welcome to them. Turns out this was her uncle's old hunting bus. He had rigged it up to take it on hunting trips instead of buying a camper. I bet he had a lot of fun in this thing. Thanks for watching our video today. Remember to subscribe and click the bell so you get our future videos and follow this build from start to finish.