Foundation installation in Kirkland WA - walls that drain and a house that sits steady

Usually you're building a new house or an addition, or the old foundation has given out and needs replacing, and you want to know what it'll cost, how long it'll hold you up and whether the new one will crack. The price mostly follows the size of the house, the type of foundation and how much digging and drainage your lot needs, while the schedule turns more on the permit, any site studies and the weather than on pour day itself. I'll give you a figure for your own lot after I've walked it, and if a flat slab on the ground suits your plans better, that's our slab foundation building work.

From the first visit I'm asking where the water goes, because a foundation lives or dies by how its walls drain. Once the permit is in hand, we lay out the house, dig to the depth the plans call for and check the bottom of the dig so the footings, the wide concrete base under the walls, land on firm, undisturbed ground. We pour the footings, then set the wall forms with rebar, steel bars that hold the concrete together when it's pushed or bent, and pour each wall in one continuous pour where we can so it doesn't end up with a weak seam. After curing, the wait while the concrete hardens and gains strength, we strip the forms, coat the outside of the walls, run a drain along the base and backfill so water has an easy way down and away. Concrete shrinks as it dries, so I'll tell you up front that hairline cracks in a wall are normal, and the coating and the drain are what keep water from following them in. If the budget gets tight, those two are the last things I'd cut, because once the dirt goes back nobody sees them and nobody can reach them without digging that whole side back out.

Every foundation starts with concrete footings, and we pour those as their own job too when an addition, deck or porch needs solid points to stand on. When the project is a small shop or office building, the paving usually comes next, and we take on concrete parking lot building so the lot is graded to carry water away from the walls we just poured.

A new foundation in Kirkland needs a building permit, because the city requires one to build or alter a building, and its permit list also covers digging out or bringing in more than 50 cubic yards of soil or changing drainage, which a foundation dig can easily do. When a job needs a permit, I tell you at the estimate, then we take care of the application with the city or county or walk you through it, so you know where it stands. What changes the job most here is whether your lot sits in one of the city's landslide or earthquake hazard areas, because the city asks more of those lots before and during the work, from a separate permit to studies of the site.

We're based in Kirkland and work across the cities around it, inside city limits and out in the county areas too. Plenty of lots here slope toward the lake or sit tight against the neighbors, which makes the dig and the drainage plan the hard part, and we meet the same hillside work on jobs in Mercer Island and Issaquah.