Lakefront Build – #3 A Strong Foundation

At Okanagan Glacier Homes, we’ve built many homes throughout the valley. We get a lot of questions about what’s involved in building a custom home. We do our best to walk you through the process, but we’re going to take that a step further and show you exactly what it takes by letting you follow along with our latest builds.

You can follow along with this project, the Lakefront Build, as we post blogs and videos during the entire process.

Read: Part 1 , Part 2

In part 2, we were putting the forms up. In this part, we’re taking them down.

A lot of lumber was used to make these forms for our custom home build just outside of Kelowna. Putting it up took a lot of work, but taking it down involves just as much labour.

Because of the location of the property, access isn’t as simple as driving a truck up next to it to haul things away. That would be just a little too convenient.

Everything we want on the site has to be hauled up and down from the road. That’s a lot of materials.

Occassionally we do get a helping hand!

Moving the equipment into place is also a precision job. Once the lumber is removed, we start the process of back filling parts of the the property. This involves moving large amounts of dirt into tiny spaces.

In the next photo you’ll see two levels – both of which have had the dirt put back and are somewhat leveled. Once all the dirt is put back in to place, we’ll start the process of insulating the ground, putting in pipework, and adding the cement for the floor.

Proper planning is really important for many of the pipes we need to lay down before the concrete goes in. Any errors in this step will mean digging out fresh concrete to fix things. Our design and drafting team make this part of the process extremely easy of us.

The foundation is really starting to take shape here. Basic piping is in.

In the next photo, you can see how the majority of the work we’re doing is still below street level – which is the only access to the property.