My wife and I recently bought a 1946 wartime home in Regina (SK)that has what appears to be a backfilled dirt basement. We had an engineer look at it before we bought the home and he thought there was a full basement there at one time but it had been back filled to the depth of about 3 feet for some reason. The foundation walls are poured concrete have had openings for windows above grade. Currenly there are steep stairs going down to a small full height part of the basement where the furnace and water heater is located. There is a concrete slab for that small area as well as short concrete walls going up to the level of the dirt that fills the rest of the basement.Why on earth would our basement be backfilled with soil? Is the engineer correct in assuming it's not just a large crawl space?
Answer:
I'd have to be convinced that the baseent was all full depth at one time. If that were the case you would have an awful lot of heavage and mould and humidity that would be all but unbearable. You are located on what we call 'gumbo' clay and it is too unstable to consider anything else. It would be worth you while to excavate behind one or two of those concrete stub walls to confirm or refute your inspector's findings. I rather suspect that the full-depth portion was an afterthought.
