Hi Everyone,

I have been lurking around here for a while and found alot of useful information but thought I would finally sign up to ask a question of my own.

At the moment, my partner and I live in a 3br weatherboard house that was built in around 1960's. We are slowly renovating the whole place and getting rid of some dodgy work carried out by the previous owners!

Our garage is underneath the house, between the piers (as shown in the attachments). Now the problem here is that on average, the height underneath is only 1.82m, not very high and means you have to do a bit of ducking to miss your head! Over the next year or two we have plans of putting a garage down the back of the property and redirecting the driveway which means we have the chance to do something with this garage downstairs - mainly just want another room down there at the moment but just want to focus on dropping the slab enough to get some decent height under there. Also, see the attachment that i drew up - it shows how the land slopes away and after speaking to my old man (surveyor) he thinks we should be able to get at least 400mm out of the garage/driveway and still ahve the water run towards the back of the property (hope that makes sense).

Lastly, no services run under the garage slab.

Keeping in mind that I would like to do most the works (labour wise etc) and I have access to a bobcat, excavator, jack hammers and a few mates are tradesmen (bricky, concreter, plumber, carpenter) - what is the best way to go about this?

I am assuming the main cost will be actually underpinning the existing pier/footings?

I know that the question is quite broad, but I would just like to see peoples opinions/experiences with this sort of work. We don't really want to carry out the work if it means it will cost us 50k+! So any help would be great, or information about who I should talk to would be even better!

Cheers,
Andrew.

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