Foundation Woes

Now that the dirtwork is complete, we were going to drill and pour piers today. But the foundation contractor called and wanted to discuss that with us. We are in the middle of a long drought here and the soil is extremely dried out. North Texas has tons of foundation problems due to our expansive clay soil. Basically, our soils test showed that our soil had a Potential Vertical Rise (PVR) index of 6 inches. The plan to remediate that was to soak the soil for several days ahead of time, putting 40,000 gallons of water down to get the moisture content to where it needs to be all the way to the 4' deep level. But the foundation contractor put 50,000 gallons on one last week and it only accomplished that to about 1'. So he wanted us to discuss other options with the foundation engineer.

I spoke with the foundation engineer as well as a geotechnical engineer at length today and we decided that since it was so dry, piers were pointless since their purpose is to prevent settling, not rising. When starting out that dry, settling is not ever going to be an issue. Also, we're most likely going to do a process where they inject chemicals into the soil to change the composition so that it rejects moisture and will not expand. The PVR in this case will be changed to less than 1 inch. It will be pretty expensive but with the deletion of the piers hopefully the total cost will not be too much more. In any case, we've got to get the foundation right so it's a cheap insurance policy.

I have a call into the chemical injection company. Hope to get a price and get them started next week. We'll find out for sure after we talk to them but both the engineer and the foundation guy said they thought it would only delay the start of the foundation by a week or two.