Your New Cottage Should Have An ICF Foundation

Thinking about building a new custom home or new custom cottage up on the Bruce Peninsula this spring/summer?

If you have then you have properly envisioned what the place would look like, the inside the outside, the windows, the siding, the finishing's, the kitchen and the bathroom. But something that people don't put enough thought into is their foundation. Nobody thinks about their foundation, until of course they have problems with their foundations!

Something that you as the homeowner should be asking your contractor about is the options for your foundation. What do I mean about options? Aren't all foundations concrete or block? Yes and NO.

A questions every homeowner should ask their contractor is "WHAT ABOUT ICF?". What is ICF. It stands for Insulated Concrete Forms.

Basically instead of building your foundation out of concrete you build the foundation with large foam blocks. The foam blocks look like large Lego blocks but they have a a hallow space in the middle where you place the rebar and the concrete. An ICF wall is basically a concrete wall with its long underwear still on.

Why do you want your concrete wall to have long underwear? Well once you pour the concrete in the ICF forms your foundation wall is completed! That's tight it's basically done. The wall is already insulated and has built in webs so that you can attach the drywall too or hang a picture or place stone or brick on the outside.

What's the limitations to building out of ICF? Nothing, you can even create round walls with it. There is no set size or shape that it has to be in.

Worried about mice and bugs? Nothing lives in an ICF wall, the foam has no food value so nothing lives in it and if something decided to try and burrow through the foam from the outside they would end up running into the concrete wall that's behind the foam.

ICF foundations made your basement or crawlspace warm and dry, a basement made out of ICF is usually the coziest basement you've ever been in.

If your contractor hasn't talked to you about building your basement out of ICF then maybe you need a new contractor.

If you like the idea of building your foundation so that it is warm and cozy and well insulated then send me an email and let's see if we can get you an ICF foundation.

Email me at greatlakescustomhomes@gmail.com

Rob Abbott
Great Lakes Custom Homes Inc.