As you can tell from Mark's post, we've decided to put the floor of our wood-stove alcove at ground level so we can use Concrete. This is a new building endeavor for us since lugging concrete back to our old core homestead just wasn't happening! So I spent a while researching to figure out the nuts and bolts.

Words are so important in projects like this, and here are the relevant ones for this project --- we're building a frost-protected shallow Foundation (a subset of slab on grade aka monolithic slab). Basically, by insulating the outside perimeter, this type of concrete foundation dramatically reduces the depth and complexity of the required footer.

In our case, we only need to go down 12 inches and to use insulation with an R value of 4.5 around the perimeter (which equates to 1 inch of Type IV expanded polystyrene). If you live further north, you might need to add horizontal insulation sunk into the ground outside the perimeter of the foundation as well. This document walks you through all of the calculations.

There's lots more to plot out. But this should carry us through the digging stage!