I'm going to start by saying I'm not a cold weather person either. Is the basement a must? Why not just do a pier foundation and set beams. With your "equipment" and means and auger and sonotube and steel beams seems like a much simpler solution.
I really like the idea of sonotubes. I just don't like the idea that there'd only be shitty options for enclosing the bottom of the wall
crawlspace sucks because animals will get in, and they're a bitch to insulate without causing massive mold problems
basement sucks because then I've gotta heat the place or it'll all bust up
I'm just figuring on putting in a perimeter foundation mainly so I can have poured concrete walls, with the base of the wall below the frost line so it doesn't lift and bust up.
I like reading threads like this. But I always have a question; wouldn't it be easier, faster and not much more $ to bulldoze and start over.
over. Not meant to be an insult, honest question.
100% the plan going in was to burn everything down
I always confused everyone by describing the house as "a burn-down"
poked around in there and figured I can fix it for much cheaper, really proven right on that one with the current lumber market
I'm only into this structure about $2k and it is sorta kinda half liveable already.
It would absolutely be faster and easier to just plop a mobile home 40' away and let this shithole fall into a pile, except for the fact that when I poked around a little, a single wide mobile home is like $40k, a few years old
if you've already got the motors, you should be able to get/rent some smaller heads for the whips so that you can fanangle them into the forms better
the motor is the head, it's like 3-3.5" diameter, the hose is just a power cord with a really neat inline switchbox that looks like old mining equipment. You toss one of these in a 5 gallon bucket of water and no joke fully half the bucket flies out at you.
Kinda sucks as you can't even really hold them against formwork, as unless you hold it a few feet up the hose you've got some instant-arthritis going on