They have arrived!
I’ve posted before about the repair of my 325 year old wooden house foundation.
Two permits arrived a few days ago, a demolition permit to remove the ground floor and the building permit for the new foundation. The great paper chase is almost over!
Some key points in the permits are:
The technical architect needs to do more work. In particular, I have a common wall with one of my neighbors who is not repairing his foundation at the same time (even though his is in bad shape too). I need to stabilize this wall using support only from my foundation and this requires extra piles and a special concrete structure. The technical architect needs to do another ground test to verify the depth of the stable ground layer and combine this with some more calculations for this special wall support. The good news is I get to bill my neighbor for half the extra cost this support is costing!
Bad News: My ground is seriously contaminated with heavy metals! Good News: The main problem is zinc (Zn), which is non-toxic to humans, in fact it can even be purchased as a food supplement. There are only slight traces of mercury (Hg) and lead (Pb). The ground under my house has to be dug up anyway as part of the foundation repair, so the main consequence is I will have to pay to have it disposed of as chemical waste and replaced with clean sand. The city will also inspect the building site and insure there is no spread of the contamination during the work. If anyone is interested, apparently zinc comes primarily from metal smelting.
An archaeological study is needed, and someone from the city will come and have a quick look when they tear up the floor. If nothing is obvious, the foundation repair can go as planned.
Next Step Quotes
We have requested a couple of quotes from contractors. We have two quotes in. One was just bad, the contractor didn’t understand what was going on. The other was good, but since we don’t have much to compare it with, we don’t know if it’s the right price.
Already one contractor has pulled out completely. He said this business with the wall with the neighbors is just too complicated for him.
We’re waiting for one more quote, but we might ask for more too. The main problem is there are not many more contractors around to ask quotes from.
Congratulations with the permits. Hope you will get a reasonable price from the best contractor.
Any old town in europe will contain heavy metals in the soil, since heavy metals was used in paints for the buildings woodwork, and in many other ways, long time before pollution was “invented”. One have to live with this in a reasonable way. Children can be protected from a major part of the pollution simply by changing the upper layer of soil, having them eating clean soil instead of heavy metals when putting gardensoil in the mouth.
Oh! It all sounds horribly expensive. Good luck.
Hey,
I just found out that I might have a similar problem with my house, when I stumbeled over your reports. If you are looking for contractors still, check this website:
http://www.platformfundering.nl/
They do have quite a lot of advertisements for contractors.
On another Internetpage I found out that the prices for the renewal are supposed to be in between 900-1500 € per sqm, depending on technique and complexity.
So Long,
Sebastian