by Levi Hochstetler
Here are pros and cons on the five most common foundation types: Full basement, crawl space, slabs, piles and poles.
Full Basement
In the Midwest, this is the most common and practical foundation. Compared to a crawl space, investing a few more dollars in a full basement will give you a lot of additional usable space. It will likely be the least expensive living space of your entire home. Besides providing you with a nice space for the furnace, utilities, and storage, other options can include bedrooms, bathroom, family room, man cave, game room, media room, wet bar, and even garage space.
A basement can also double as a storm shelter. Helpful in particular if you build in tornado alley. Certain areas of the basement are often used as a root cellar for food storage. This is generally under a porch, breezeway or sunroom wing. If your site is in a low-lying or level area most likely a sump-pump would be required to ensure a dry basement. If where you are building frequently loses power a backup generator is recommended to ensure your pump works during power outages. This also applies for crawl spaces.
In times past, foundation walls were difficult to keep dry. Today with additional reinforcement, better sealers and proper drainage they can be very dry. Consider ICF’s (insulated concrete forms) for the ultimate comfort in basement living, especially if you're planning a bedroom or family room there.
Crawl Space
Second to a full basement, crawl spaces are the most common system used in the Midwest. They aren’t as expensive as a full basement but yet allow space for utilities, and most importantly, access to your water, electrical and HVAC runs.
Today’s crawl spaces have come a long ways from what was considered a crawl space in the old days. As any experienced plumber can testify, they traditionally were a dark, filthy space where there was hardly enough room to scoot around in. Many crawl spaces now have a ceiling height of four feet or more. It’s not unusual to be able to stand up in them. Most have a gravel floor on top of a moisture barrier and some even have concrete floors. This gives you a nice space for the furnace and for storage if needed. However, the question remains: why not add a few more courses of block and have a nice full basement?
Personally, we chose a crawl space for our log cabin next to the pond. We now wish we would have gone to the extra trouble and expense to put in a full basement. It would have been a nice place to store the fishing tackle, life jackets, and oars, and in the winter, skates and hockey sticks. All that wet and snowy gear you don’t want inside the cabin.
Slab
Other than pole or the pile system a slab is the least expensive. They are popular in some areas of the country where it is hard to obtain natural drainage away from the basement or crawl space, such as in parts of Florida. Locally, they are recently becoming more popular, perhaps mostly because they are less expensive than a full basement or crawl space.
Often, retirees prefer a slab, wanting to avoid stairs by having everything on ground level. The key disadvantage is plumbing, heating and electrical placement and having no access to maintain them in the future. Yet, with a lot of planning and thought some of those concerns can be overcome.
Often, homeowners complain that their feet hurt walking on concrete. To correct that, designers and builders put in “sleepers” with a subfloor and finally the finish floor on it. If you do this you are back to the cost of a crawl space.
Slabs are somewhat easier to design for seismic resistance when building in earthquake-prone areas.
Piles
This is a viable solution where there is potential flooding. Concrete pile foundations are constructed with a regular boxed subfloor system and normally enclosed with insulation and soffit underneath. These are most common in coastal areas where flooding can occur. Occasionally, piles are used for the construction of log homes.
Poles
This system gets mostly utilized in the construction of pole barns and utility sheds. When used in residential construction they are often called
“Barn-dominiums.” Except for small cabins, poles with their short life span and depreciative value are not practical to support log homes.
Recently, manufacturers have started to make what they call Perma Columns, (wooden poles that have concrete ends attached). Accordingly, only the concrete and not the treated wood is exposed to the ground. That has substantially increased the useful life of poles. Unfortunately, with no deep foundation as a barrier around the perimeter, rodents are known to dig under the concrete slab of pole structures.
Conclusion
It’s not unusual to have a mixture of foundation types in the construction of a log home.
Typically, the main home might be on a full basement, the breezeway and the three season room on a crawl space, and the garage on a slab.
Like everything else in building a home, give it a lot of thought during the design process. The key is to imagine yourself living in the home doing your day-to-day chores. Always give your daily routines priority over things that happen once or twice a year. This helps prevent a lot of “should-a-have’s.” It is very expensive to put a basement under a home that is already built, though people sometimes do exactly that!
