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The next phase in the construction of our house is pouring the basement and garage floor slabs. This is pretty self explanatory but there are a few things that go along with this phase that you have to plan and make the final decisions on. These mainly consist of plumbing decisions. The basement plumbing actually is laid before the slab is poured. The concrete is poured over the plumbing and if you don’t have all your drains in place, it is too late to add more.

One thing that was an addition and an unexpected cost was the lift pump. A lift pump is designed to lift the sewage up into the main sewer line. This is only needed if the sewer line comes in higher than where the drain pipes are that run throughout the basement. Obviously, the drains up stairs will have the benefit of letting gravity do its job and carry the sewage down to the sewer line, but the basement drainage might not have that luxury. We did not know how this would work out because you don’t know how deep the sewer line is actually buried until you dig it up and since you don’t dig the sewer line up until you need to, you can’t really plan for this.

If you take a look at the following picture, you’ll see a pipe hole in the footer of the foundation. This was pre-drilled so that if the sewer line was that deep, we could just come in through that and then not have to worry about a lift pump because the sewer line would actually be lower than what the basement drains would be, hence all the sewage would flow down with the aid of gravity.

That isn’t exactly the way it worked out. In this picture, you’ll see that the actual sewer line was  only buried about 5 ft. below ground level making the entrance into the house have to be much higher. Actually, it had to come into the foundation wall about 3 ft. higher than the footer hold we drilled.

So, since that didn’t work out, we had to get a lift pump. Simply put, this pumps that crap upward into the sewer line from the basement. It would have been better had the sewer line come in lower. Not only would it have saved us money, but now if the electricity ever goes out, we cannot use the basement facilities very much because the lift pump is electrical, and if it isn’t working, then nothing gets pumped up and out into the sewer. So, that is just one thing that I learned during this phase that I didn’t ever think of before. The good thing is, all the rest of the bids we have coming in are actually lower than anticipated so that will offset the extra expense of the lift pump. Take a look at some more pictures of the basement and the garage concrete slabs being poured.

[View with PicLens]

If you look real close, you can see the beginning of the basement frame going up. They started framing last Thursday and man are they moving fast. They already have the entire basement framed and are starting on the top level. They are estimating to be done in 3 weeks if we continue to have good weather. I’m so excited to see this thing framed and roofed. Then you’ll be able to see what it is going to look like inside. Check back in a week or so as I’m going to make a post about the framing and how that is going. Here is a teaser picture of what the basement looks like as I’m posting this today.