valhalla360 wrote:
What part of the country are you in? My parents did it for years and the basement never heaved and thier place is in Michigan.
The basement foundations should reach below the frost line so heaving should be a non-issue. Likewise, the walls shouldn't buckle in unless there was something else already very wrong.
I'm located in zone 3a. When you have extreme cold things do happen. A few winters back we had early cold snap with no snow cover. Code is frost line is four feet down. Miners in the area were reporting frost at 7-9 feet deep in the mines. Code is only for the norm, not the exceptions. Basements do heave and they do buckle, especially if they are in clay and left unheated.
