Nearly Ready for Basement Slab

The next big step is to pour the concrete basement slab. Once it cures a bit, they can back fill the basement walls that are below grade. The concrete slab keeps the ground (especially the water and frost in the earth) from pushing in the basement walls.

The rough plumbing is already in, but it still needs to be buried better.

Bathroom drain needs more gravel and less water around it.

We are concerned about the water inside the foundation. You can see it in the trench next to the foundation in the next picture, as well as around the drain pipe in the previous picture.

Water inside the foundation.

We will be insulating under the concrete slab to keep the basement floor comfortable and to reduce energy costs.

Insulation

While Marlene was on site, she investigated the amount of tree shadow that would be blocking the sunlight coming in the windows. This was the day before the winter solstice at a little before 12:30PM. This is quite representative of the longest shadow of the winter. It looks like the tall cottonwood tree to the south is far enough away from the house.

No tree shadow on the house.

It was estimated to be about 80' tall and the house is about 165' from the tree. My experiments, carried out at home, showed that a 22" vertical ruler cast a 48" shadow at the sun's peak on the solstice. This gives a ratio of about 1:2.2. However, the base of the tree is several feet below the basement floor level. We will get a better read on this next year when we are actually living there, but for now it does not look like a problem.