$450 Tiny House Foundation

There was never any question as to whether we would build our house on a basement or crawl space foundation.  As a mason, Mike had spent too much time patching and parging leaky, wet basements to even consider building on one (I've heard these words in this combination many, many times: "every basement has moisture problems"). The expense of a basement foundation for a couple of do-it-yourselfers on a budget would have eliminated it as an option anyway.

So the real question for us was: pier foundation or floating slab?

Floating slabs held a certain appeal for me because the foundation could serve as the floor of the first level of the house if we gave it a nice finish. Also, the idea of "floating" on top of the seasonal tides of freeze and thaw rather than fighting them made a kind of intuitive sense to me. 

future location of house and the trees we used to build it

Our land is on a slope, which would have meant a lot of excavation and then the back of the house would have been in the side of the hill: welcome back moisture problems.  And all that concrete and rock would have taken a hefty chunk of our building budget.

Our abundant black locust source meant we could build the house on "free" piers (with the amount of work we put into finding, felling, dragging, and joining 10-12" diameter locust piers I just can't bring myself to not qualify "free").

setting our intention/founding statement

For $300 we hired a fella to come up and drill out six pier holes 48" deep to get below frost level.

Then we poured a concrete footer.  We had planned to sink the piers in the concrete footer but our wonderful code officer, who owns a timber framing company and has been a wealth of information, recommended against it, explaining that water would move into the space between the concrete and the pier and start to rot the wood.  

So we poured the footer, dropped the piers in the holes and back filled with rocks and dirt.  

July 31, 2013: first pier bent completed

Ok, actually we made three sets of pier "bents" consisting of two vertical piers, a horizontal beam joined to the top and braces connecting the beam to the piers. 

This was extremely heavy, hard work, but the finished product was well-worth the effort.

September 2013: all three piers finished

Total foundation cost:

$300 for the holes

$150 for the concrete

$450 foundation

Benefits of piers:

     -probably the best method for a two person (three when Mike's dad came to help) build

     -ventilation means we won't have mold/mildew/rot problems

     -low carbon footprint due to very little concrete used

     -cheap, cheap, cheap when you diy  

For technical information about the foundation (sizing piers and footers, joinery) don't hesitate to email me: barrett.ec@gmail.com. Or better yet comment!