Front Porch Construction Part 1 – Digging Posts and Pouring Concrete

The first day of construction on the new porch had a few setbacks, but nothing major. My parents joined Tom and I and we started by trying to even the ground. We quickly discovered there were still concrete footings in the ground that needed to be removed.

This was a big job, one of them was 24” deep but the other went down at least 4 ft and we could still not see the bottom. The guys tried with the sledge, then using 2x4’s as levers, even tried to drill it with the hammer drill with no luck.

After a few hours, Tom finally went back to the sledge and managed to split off 24” from the top. We buried the rest; it was deep enough that it can stay down there and not impact the new supports.

Next we dug the holes for the sono tubes. I ended up using a manual digger that you rotated, it was fun, a great workout and relatively easy as the soil was loose from all the rain we’ve been having. The holes are 8” wide and 4 ft deep and they ended up being slightly off from where they were supposed to be located, due to another huge chunk of concrete that was in the way. I also built a form for the concrete pad that the stairs will rest on and put in a base of gravel in both areas.

The guys mixed the concrete in a wheelbarrow, Tom had never done this before and was surprised at the amount of work it takes to mix, that stuff is heavy! Both areas got poured and covered for the night to keep in the humidity as it sets.

At this point we called it a day; there was little else we could do until the concrete set.

And now we know: there was a crazy deep concrete footing under the porch