Digging Footers in Georgia Clay

When I graded down, I took out about 4 feet of clay to get my home site flat, and moved the dirt outwards to create a gradual drop in elevation in all directions from my house. This way, my house is not just sitting on the top of a hill.

I marked out all my corners and put up my batter boards. I put the batter boards up far enough out so I would avoid hitting them when using the excavator. The point of batter boards is to establish square and level and be able to put your strings back up at any time to reference at any time.
Since I’m an owner builder and never operated an excavator before, I went for a slightly smaller excavator, the Powerhouse PX-10 with a 12″ bucket. My footers were to be 20″ wide and I need at least 12″ below grade. Footers in my county need to be 16″ wide x 8″ deep, I went 10″ deep and 20″ wide.

I practiced digging in an inconspicuous area in my yard for a few minutes, then came back to tackle the footers. It wasn’t the prettiest once it was done, so I went back with shovels and squared it off real nice and leveled it up. It took me about a day to complete the footers.

I opted to put two pieces of 1/2″ rebar in a continuous run around the entire building in addition to steel fiber mesh in the concrete. Once everything was in, I remembered that I wanted to put a 6 mil plastic down to protect the footers from any water in the future, so we pulled some under the rebar before the pour the next day.

I called around and haggled on the concrete and got a price of $105 a yard, nylon fiber was another $6 per yard. I calculated how much concrete I needed by using this concrete volume calculator and figured I needed about 7 yards.

The morning of the pour, I will admit that I was a little nervous, I’m an novice owner builder, I’m no concrete contractor, but this is a pretty simple pour. I watched tons of videos, read through my owner building book and checked and rechecked my level lines.

Once the lines are up and level, you measure down as to the depth of your concrete. We poured a little, spread it out, all while checking the measurement from the line for level. We got to the end and put a little extra concrete into the trench to work with once the truck left… You can always take concrete out, but once the truck leaves you can’t put anymore in.

Quotes I received to contract out the footers were $4500-$5000. My cost was $1200 for everything: concrete, excavator rental, a buddy to help me, rebar, plastic liner… and my labor was free :) I still need to build my stem wall for my crawlspace, so I expect to spend another $450 on block, 3 courses high. I am still in the mega savings zone.