The foundations

Our foundations are straighforward trench fill. Given good site conditions, this is a quick and affordable option - so it’s the go-to choice for many self builders. Essentially, it involves little more than excavation to the right depth and width, before the resulting trends is filled and leveled with concrete via a pump from the delivery truck. At around 150mm-200mm below ground level, two courses of clockwork (in two skins) are laid to reach the damp proof course (DPC) and provide a base for the floor structure.

One of the advantages of trench fill is that it can get you out of the ground very quickly, The concrete for The Build it House could be place in as little as a day, which keeps labour cost to a minimum and is a good match to the speed advantages of our chosen timber frame construction route.

The main alternative to trench fill is to use strip footings, which involves less concrete but more foundation clockwork. As the name suggests, the footings are limited to a plinth at the bottom of the trench - usually around 200mm thick and strengthened with some steel rebar or mesh reinforcement. This represents a massive saving on the cost of ready-mix concrete. While this is quite a bit cheaper than using masses of ready-mix, building foundation walls in narrow trenches is much harder than above-ground work - so it’s slower an labour costs are significantly higher. As a result, the overall cost of strip and trench fill foundations tends to be fairly similar - though the latter has the advantage as the excavations get deeper.