The Foundation

The old dog lot cement slab was poured more than 20 years ago, and somewhere in a thaw the cement had cracked, probably due to the ground moving and/or water getting into the slab and freezing. We needed to do a few things to strengthen it up and level it, and we needed a strong base to carry the weight of the building and stones that would make up the bothy. First we had to dig a trench all the way around the slab, about 2-3 feet deep and 1.5 feet across, so we could pour in concrete for footings on which the stone weight would rest. John figured we would need to pour at least a few cubic meters of concrete. When digging this trench it's important the sides are nice and plumb and the bottom is level, with right angles where the sides and bottom meet. This ensures the concrete isn't rounded or curved when it sets so that it is good and strong and won't shift.

Once we had all the footings dug, John got a concrete truck in to pour. I wasn't around that day, but I'm told the fellow driving the truck somehow got mixed up and mistakenly poured about a cubic metre of concrete onto the top of the slab instead of in the footings. John and a few other helpers had to push all of it back into the footings, which is pretty hefty work as wet concrete weighs a ton. Nevertheless it all got done and no one got injured, so happy days!

You can see below that since the dog lot is built on a hill, we needed to put in a series of step downs for the concrete, similar to locks in a canal. Once the cement dried we took out the plywood forms and stakes that held them in place and we had a very nice cement base on which to build.

With the footings in place, the next step was to lay the blocks up to the level of the existing dog lot slab. We got a bunch of simple but very decent masonry blocks from Lowe's just near our farm, which are the 'stones' that will be the sides of the bothy. We laid these across all four sides of the house, with the shapes at each long end of the bothy accommodating a fireplace on one end and a crawlspace (under the bathroom) at the other end. To lay the stone we mixed up lots of wheelbarrows worth of Type-S mortar which we used where we needed more mortar, leveling, or backfill between the original slab and the masonry blocks. We also used glue to bind the blocks for higher courses of stone where they were level, with a bit of masonry mix if we needed to do some shimming. You can see in the photos below John is positioning our string line which is the guide we use to ensure the course is level and each stone follows the same path. You can also see the skill saw we used to cut all the stone.

Below you can see pretty clearly the break in the old slab. We will fix that up in a bit.

A quick few photos to document all the fun. I'm not sure John is that happy about all the photos, but in hindsight I didn't take nearly as many as I would have liked.

There was a decent amount of stone cutting that was necessary, particularly for the corner areas. All we had was our skill saw with a stone blade, it did the trick, but it wasn't the easiest going. However the joins ended up looking very clean and tidy, so we were pretty happy with the work.

In the wall in the photo below, we had to insert small blocks into the various courses because the building length didn't quite fit exact numbers of blocks. We stepped up the little blocks in what hopefully ended up being an orderly fashion. I'm pretty sure professional stone layers would have done it better, but it seems okay.

Once the stone had all been laid, we ensured all the gaps between the original slab and the masonry blocks was backfilled, and we also backfilled and tamped the outside of the blocks in the footing trench where it was deeper. Then we had a dump truck load of gravel brought in and we used our front end bucket on our tractor to put the gravel all around the stone masonry. This firmed up the base and gave us the solid foundation we needed.

With the basic foundation in place, we next drilled in some 1x6 pressure treated boards to tie in the crawlspace to the foundation. You can also see in the below photo the pipes we installed in the stone to run the water, power, and sewer lines.

This gave us the overall solid foundation we needed, so we moved on to leveling off the slab. To do this we needed a lot of material, as we had a good 3 inches lower slab at one end than the other. So we pulled out our 6 foot mortar pan that John's dad used to use on his job sites back in the day and we mixed up a whole heap of material to add to the slab to level it. We used an 8 foot piece of wood to level all the cement across the slab, and when we were done we had a nice level surface coming right up to the top of the highest course of stone masonry.

We thought about installing the pavers at this point (the stones that would form the floor) but decided that we didn't have enough time before the weather turned. Here is John contemplating that decision and quickly coming to the conclusion we needed to pack it up.

So with John making the decision that the base was completed, we closed it up with some plastic and a few cedar slabs and stones to keep everything neat and we called it for the coming winter. With any luck it would be ready for building come spring. Looking at the photo below you wouldn't think there was that much work that went into it, but a lot of it is underground now.