Now that we have our “blank canvas”, we turn our attention to raising the height of the foundation. Although this home had never flooded, we took advantage of the opportunity to raise the foundation. This process took two phases.

Phase 1 was to even out the existing floor elevation. This home had several different levels of sunken floors. Since we were keeping the original foundation, we needed to level out the floors to allow for ease of mobility. We installed grade beams and added about four inches of concrete tying it into the existing foundation. We also added concrete bonding adhesive and dowels (the vertical rebars drilled into the foundation) to make sure that the new concrete stayed secure.

Below shows after we finished pouring the concrete.

Phase 2 was to raise the elevation of the foundation one foot higher. We created a one foot crawlspace using open web trusses. One benefit of this approach is that now we can run the sanitary lines through the web trusses, allowing easier access to the lines should they ever need to be repaired.

The last step was to install subfloors on top of the trusses.

Now that the foundation is complete, we have moved onto framing…