Basement Expansion Part 10

At this point the project has settled into a cycle of digging out the next section of the perimeter, installing rebar, building forms, and pouring concrete. Rinse and repeat. We can only pour about forty (40) inches of perimeter at a time, so to speed up this process, we needed to work a night shift attack from both ends.

This is the view at the other end of the basement looking towards the workshop. At the center of this area is a cinder block retaining wall which the pervious owner of the house did not complete - the footing extends into the foreground in the photo below. To the right is the foundation which supports the front entrance porch. This section of the concrete has been braced with timber at some point in the past because it leans. I don't want to disturb the porch foundation or the cinder block wall, so I have to figure out how to fill-in the gaps and join these areas to the new foundation.

This is sometime later after I dug out the dirt/rock below and behind the porch foundation and poured a new bench foundation to support the porch. 

The rebar that protrudes from the new concrete will join up with the rest of the new bench foundation later. This is how it looks after the rebar was trimmed and capped off with some scrap lumber - safety first!

Top marks if you predicted what comes next. If you didn't, the answer is stairs. The forms for the risers were constructed from nominal 2" x 8" doug fir, so they are actually 7½ inches high. The cinder blocks are 7¾, so there was a bit of fudging going on, but I did make sure that all the steps are level left-to-right.

I installed the rebar intro the new concrete, and did my best to attach it to the cinder blocks.

 

Just add concrete...

And there you have it, a set of stairs:

Tune in again next tine to see where the staircase leads to...