Renaissance Homes debuts the first video in our construction series. Learn about the home foundation dig out with Randy Sebastian, President of Renaissance Homes. Find out the key points of this initial stage of your new home and why Renaissance does it better. Randy walks you through the excavation process and the terraced foundation. He also explains the reasons we lay our foundations with gravel. [expand title="View Transcript" swaptitle="Hide Transcript" swapalt="Hide Transcript" trigclass="arrowright"] Intro Hi, I'm Randy Sebastian, President of Renaissance Homes. We're doing a video series to explain to you guys exactly why Renaissance Homes are built better than any other builders and then detail the construction process of what we do to build you the most energy efficient, best built home in Portland. We're in fact the number one LEED builder in the state, no other builder builds as many LEED certified homes as we do and there's a reason for that: Renaissance Homes are just built better. So I want to show you guys exactly what we do. Home Foundation This is really where it starts, it's the excavation of the home. You can see what we've done, we've terraced this lot it falls to the back. We've terraced to where, obviously it's flat for the footings but there's a little bit of slope for the low point crawl space drain. Not only that you can see I'm standing on gravel, a bed of gravel. We do that for a couple reasons. First, it's easier for our guys when they're working around and they're not in the mud and they do a better job. Two, when we're done guess what, you've got gravel in your crawl space over the mud. We'll put Visqueen over it but you're gonna have gravel which is much better for future home inspections, it's just a better finish. To my knowledge we're the only builder that does that as well. That's one thing we really pride ourselves in is setting the right grade for the house, getting the excavation right, getting the driveway slope right, and making sure that water drains away from the house. You really only have one chance to make sure you excavate correctly and we make sure we do it right. Outro Thank you for joining us today. You can go to our website Renaissance-Homes.com for more information. [/expand] Renaissance Homes is an award winning Street of Dreams custom home builder specializing in green building and remodeling for the Portland market.