Each building project is different and some may chose to go with the traditional concrete footer foundation, but we preferred the cheaper method requiring much less excavation on our mountain build site. Digging post holes with protected and wrapped posts was the perfect solution for us.
My Grandfather always torched the underground area of his fence posts on his farm when he made fencing for the different horse pastures. I’ve seen this on other homestead channels as well but that notch is a first for me.
Yeah the torch method is way better than doing nothing for sure and is totally fine for posts. For our home I wanted the extra rot prevention with these wrapped glu lam posts 👍 Thanks for watching! 🙂
Interesting! I had no idea about that but I can see this being good information because a ton of people around us are building pole barn homes, they are lovely.
I am surprised there was no mention of the EPA restrictions on traditional types of pressure treatments for general home use in 2004. CCA and other treatments were very effective at penetrating deep into woods like Hem Fir and Southern Yellow Pine. The new products barely penetrate a 1/4 of an inch and use predominately copper compounds that can wreak havoc on galvanized fasteners and aluminum flashings. There are also many studies that show products like CCA are not really harmful to the environment. One thing for sure is, the huge waste of natural resources, man-hours, and equipment lost to the premature rot of crucial support structures is very harmful to the environment and our economy, also I would like to note that good quality tight grain lumber can rot pretty darn fast too if it is not properly treated. The topic makes for a good discussion and brings a little more awareness to the job of building with wood.
To me I prefer to have my posts run continuously above and bellow the ground without the bracket hardware, but each build is different. With the bracket mounts you’d need a proper concrete footer running under the building perimeter but we didn’t want that at our location on the mountain. So you’re talking way less time and money just needing to did post holes instead of that foundation.
Like LittleMountainLife said, there are plenty of alternatives for sleeving posts without spending $200/pc. Farmers have been doing it themselves for years for pennies a post and they last decades.
