With the basement ready to pour on the lakeview job we can feel a bit of relief. Each excavation carries with it some risk. You can dig to the footing grade and encounter a lot of surprises. In some urban horror stories the builder has unearthed old garbage dumps, streams, and often soil that isn’t supportive of weight. This can require costly remedies like filling with many lifts of compacted gravel or screw piles. The lakeview project did avoid the worst of these outcomes. We had some areas of soil that were initially seeming to be a little wet and soft however at the finished grade we passed a bearing test. The old basement we removed was very deep and we had to fill in some areas with gravel on a geotextile fabric and a wider footing. This used another $1000 worth of concrete as well in unexpected volume. Now we can proceed with confidence that our basement will be solid for decades to come, just as crack free and reliable as the 60 year old basement we hauled away was.