[AT] OT - Wooden vs Concrete?

[charlie hill]

That makes sense Ralph.  My background is primarily in industrial 
construction so I often think in terms that are "overkill" for normal 
residential stuff.  If I were building in your area and planning on having a 
finished basement I'd be thinking in terms of pour concrete walls with 
fairly heavy re-enforcing bars in the walls and tying the walls to the floor 
with water stop strips in the joints.  Outside I'd want to put something 
like coal tar epoxy on the concrete (or maybe some sort of Bentonite clay 
product) with foam boards outside of that and then a French drain filled all 
the way up to slightly above ground level with stone and then sand slope the 
landscaping so that surface water drains away from the foundation.   However 
that is very expensive work.  I guess the treated wood is a reasonable and 
much cheaper alternative.

Charlie

-----Original Message----- 
From: Ralph Goff
Sent: Monday, April 11, 2011 10:38 AM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group
Subject: Re: [AT] OT - Wooden vs Concrete?

On 4/11/2011 6:09 AM, charlie hill wrote:
> It's an interesting concept.    I'm assuming you have a frost line 
> probably
> about 3 feet or greater?   Around here if one was putting in a full 
> basement
> and was worried about having it heated they would most likely build a
> masonry block basement wall, put waterproofing on the outside surface and
> then put thick foam board against the outside before back filling against
> the wall.
Charlie, frost line is pretty deep here in a normal winter. Water lines
are buried 8 feet deep last time I checked. Frost and the resulting soil
expansion contributes to cracked concrete basements here. Thats one
advantage of wood, won't crack. The water table is not usually so high
as it is this year. It will be interesting to see if it does affect the
wooden basements.
Here the basement is often "finished" as in it is a main part of the
living area of the house.

Ralph in Sask.

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