Soil Sampling

As I mentioned in my last post, the field retains water in a horrible way. So before we built, we made sure to take the necessary steps to answer the question... "Can we really build here?" The answer came back "Yes", but it would take some engineering... which wouldn't be cheap (more on that when I post re: the foundation)

Here's a picture of Abby and Abram strolling in the swamp. The picture faces northeast... I am standing on the road leading to the pond, which is over my left shoulder. The engineering company is delivering the cool contraption on the road.

It was too wet to bring out the "normal" drilling equipment, so they had to break out the special equipment to avoid getting stuck. A remote controlled track-driven drilling machine. Yeah, it was awesome.




They drilled 2 twenty-foot borings. Every few feet they would take and label a sample. It was so soupy, at times it seemed as though they were taking water samples rather than soil samples. Christy and I couldn't help but think "And we want to build our house on this mess?".


The results were not promising. The geotechnical survey essentially said we were building on crappy ground. It only took 30 pages of engineering-speak to tell us that.

The short version. We have very silty dirt which retains moisture. That silt sits on top of highly expansive clay... meaning that when it gets wet it expands, causing the ground to heave. "highly expansive" is apparently a 4-letter word in the foundation/engineering world. After the layer of clay, there's more silt sitting on top of even more clay. The clay (at both levels) acts as a liner of sorts... It doesn't allow water to soak into the ground (no wonder most successful ponds have a clay base). As a result, we have a water-table 1 to 3 feet below the surface... Making engineering a challenge... to say the least. But more on that later when we talk about our foundation.