I am considering acquiring a 20×20 detached garage and having it moved to my property. The building would be free, and the moving expenses would be less than $1,000. I’ll have a slab floor and concrete block foundation. Any input and/or tricks of the trade would be appreciated, but my question centers around the excavation and footing. Should I make the footing extra wide to allow for ease of locating the building on the site, then building up the block walls under the building without concern about where the blocks sit on the footing (as long as there’s at least 4″(?) on the short side), or does the block wall that the building sets on have to be centered over the width of the footing, making pouring the footing extra wide unnecessary?
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Pour the footings, and build the walls, but leave the slab out until after you put the building in place then you can add the stone and pour the slab. By waiting you have enough room to back the trailer right into place.
It depends.
I helped pour walls for a crawlspace for an old farmhouse that was moved about 40 miles. If you'd have lined the foundation walls, there wouldn't have been much of the house sitting on wall by the time it was let down. This one, the formwork was plumbed from the wall down while the house sat on cribs in the excavated crawl, with a ramp where they backed the truck in. It was a pain getting the chute in between the house and the formwork bec they only left about a foot to work in, so think about leaving more room to chute it in and adding plasticiser to help the mud flow if space is constrained. For a block wall, most of this advice is transferable about plumbing down and leaving enough room to work.
On my own moved house, i took carefull measurements of opposite walls to make sure the walls were parallel, then measured diagonals to determine squareness. I built a full foundation ahead of time, which was easier, based on the measurements being so good and it worked out perfectly. The mover guys nudged my 1500 s.f house over a quarter inch this way or that to put it precisely on the plates.
You can also use a wood foundation for a little bit of play in the foundation, too.
But! Why are you making a foundation like this? With a detached garage, why not put it on a monolithic slab? Dig the footings about the right place, put the garage up on blocks in postition, form a perimeter, and pour the slab. Easy.