It was a very busy Monday morning. They had two caisson drilling rigs, a concrete pumper truck, and various cement trucks. They are drillings the caissons. William from Scott Cox and Assoc engineers (Soil Engineers) says the holes look good and they have no water in them. They are plenty far into bedrock (the gray clay about half way down the basement wall is the start of bedrock, which is really just undistributed soil, not rock). The report called for 26' deep piers. I spoke to William and Doug about if a 6" void is enough, William said it is, but 8" will be better, so I said let's just go with an 8" void which make it that much safer that the soil will never expand and damage the foundation. We will lose 2" of basement height, but the ceiling was over 9' anyway so this seems like a good call.

I also asked about backfilling with our "bad" (expansive) dirt. He said it would be fine, but road base or some other non expansive soil would be better, and then put a few feet of our "bad" clay soil on top of the road base to keep the water away. Harold's Excavating will come back out with a bobcat or backhoe to clear out all the extra dirt from the caisson holes.

Bad news from the county- on the garage remodel it violates the setbacks so they won't allow the new roof structure to be added within the 15' setback. I need to talk to Kyle and see what the next step is.