Gravel Foundation

Woohoo! The stone is here, hoping I ordered enough. I know what I'm doing this weekend! Have a great weekend my friends

Special Note: The quarry shorted the driver by 2 ton. I always order very close to exactly what I think I need. Its a hold over from when we had so little money and we were trying to build our cordwood masonry home. So I was concerned that I might not have enough with 2 tons missing.

Additional Thoughts

The cottage needed to be close to the house and the septic tank so I could run electricity from the house and tie into the main sewage line. The only real problem with the site I chose was that it was essentially a drainage ditch that runs diagonally from the southwest corner to the northeast corner.

Myron offered to dig a new ditch, out of the way, but that would have been a lot of work and could potentially cause other problems. So I decided to deal with the "devil I knew". I lined the ditch with 6 mil plastic, installed a perforated drain pipe at the bottom and built a landscape timber frame to contain a bed of #1 washed stone.

The idea was to build the cottage on skids on the stone and allow the water to run under the cottage and follow the path it always had out to the ditch by the road. Later on, I realized the perforated drain pipe wasn't quite enough drainage and we had to install a French drain in a different area to divert some of the water away, but after that, everything has worked well, even through tough winters we haven't had any significant frost heave.