Foundations & Concrete Work

This book has helped to teach me the fundamental facts about foundations, which is the first thing in home-building. However, I believe it omits certain types of foundations which are just as necessary to know about, namely, the frost protected shallow foundation and the floating slab foundation.

This is good for even advanced people as it gives little trade sercerts for stronger walls. Its a good book and a must if you are doing concrete work yourself.

I bought this book because I'm removing my current driveway and wanted to replace it myself to save labor costs. I did find an article on driveways which was useful to me. I also found several other article of interest becuase I plan on building my own house from the ground up in the future.As some other reviewers have pointed out, this is not a "project progression" book. There are plenty of others out there, go buy one of them. If you want to find out what's new and innovative in the trade, try this one! I recently went of a "Parade of Homes" in my area (northern Wisconsin) that was supposed to show off homes of the best builders in the area. Was I disappionted!! Only 1 of 16 homes had used any of these new ideas. Nearly every one had a damp/wet basement. People just stick with the same techniques that were used 25+ years ago. If you are about to build, buy a book like this, get informed and either do it yourself or make your builder, build you a "modern" home.

The book does offer some useful insight into how to lay concrete forms, and I bought it to do that. With no prior knowledge of concrete forms, I poured footings, and walls for a separate entrance to my basement. The only resources I used were this book and what I asked people that worked with concrete. Although I found the book helpful I am looking for one that includes things such as building concrete stairs. Overall the book will show you how to make concrete forms for footings and walls.

This book consists of a collection of articles which have appeared in the "Fine Homebuilding" magazine. As such, it covers the topics which the people who wrote the articles chose to discuss, which implies that some topics are covered more than once, while others may not be dealt with at all. There is not necessarily comprehensive coverage of the subject, which a beginner or student of the material may require.