It was a short weekend of working with rain showing up at 5am on Saturday. But on Friday we got a bunch of work done. We finished the digging under the existing slab for the footings of the garage wall. This work was done over two weekends, the first footing (east corner) took almost a full day of 2 people working. The ground was very compacted. Also, we had to use a full sized jack hammer to break up the ground.

The west corner footing only took about 3/4 of the day, with 1 person full time work and the second about 1/4 time. This time, not only was the ground marginally easier to work with, we also more appropriate tools. The hand held Makita mini jack hammer with the ‘Clay Spade’ bit worked wonders. What a different having the right tools for the job makes.

The footings were 36 inches long, 31 inches deep, and 24 inches wide. Not too big of a task except for one detail. Of the 24 inch width, 12 inches was outside the existing slab, and 12 inches was under the existing slab. So we had to dig blind with a claw hammer and e-tools to get under the slab. I guess this was a preview of work to come in digging the new footing pads under the existing house.

UPDATE 2 Jan 2006 : It finally stopped raining enough that
I could take a picture of the covers I made for the holes to protect against the rains.
I hope they did some good…