Hot tubs are very expensive luxury purchases, but we’re still kind of cheap thrifty people, so we thought, let’s save some money by building the tub foundation ourselves.
If you need a foundation for your hot tub, rent a back-hoe. Don’t do what we did, which was spend 24 man-hours each digging an 8×8 foot hole. We carefully took up and moved the sod first, which was super time-consuming and heavy, and then we dug for hours and hours and hours on a tight deadline. Next, we leveled all that dirt and laid down a frame that Jake had built which would hold the concrete to shape while it set.
Then we poured what looked like a pathetically small amount of construction sand in the hole, but it was actually 4 50-lb bags. So a lot of sand. Our soil is super sandy too, so we decided 4 bags was good enough….
Then the concrete truck came and poured the concrete into our prepared hole. Most of the concrete was poured right in the center of the hole and then we spread it out from there, which seemed like the wrong thing to do; the concrete should have been poured in multiple spots because by the time we were spreading it, some of the middle was hardening and was really difficult to move.
But whatever, we spread it around and tried to make it almost level with a slight tilt away from the house for run-off and we did an ok job for our first time working with concrete. At least it was my first time working with concrete: I don’t want to speak for Jake who isn’t here and has no knowledge of what I put in my blog posts until they’re published.
The truck also poured too much concrete because it was all lumped in the center so to make it flush and level we had to take some out and dump it over the sides of our frame or in a bucket. It was inconvenient, but overall not impossible. Most people could probably handle leveling their own small concrete pour. We put an EZ-up over the slab to protect it from possible rain while it hardened.
Once dry, we forced the wooden frame out of the ground, back-filled some dirt around the slab, and put a hot tub on it!
