Finishing up the Foundation

We left off about here with the foundation:

Looks good from that side, right?   But we ran into an issue... 

With the ground removed from the outside, an unearthed portion of the original house foundation had a spot that looked a little questionable (the inside still looked fine).  The concern was that with the added load from the new construction, it could lead to big problems down the road.  

The builder had the architect come back out and take a look to decide the best way to address this.  

They ended up removing the section that was causing the issue and decided to add a structural beam with two columns to reduce/remove the load that the new construction would place on the old foundation.

It definitely was not a good feeling to come home and see this big gaping hole...

Here's the view from the basement!

There's always some kind of surprise when renovating an old house- hopefully we've gotten that unpleasantness out of the way!

Framing has started!!!!  It's moving quickly now!

Old Trash

Owners of old houses know how much fun it is to find the trash from olden days!  It gives a little insight into the people that previously lived in the house.

While we haven't yet found any real treasures, little bits of items have turned up as we've been gardening & cleaning up the yard.  Here and here are things we've found.

And here are the most recent finds since we've been under construction...

Lots of keys!  And I like the itty bitty bottle!

We were originally putting our yard finds in a big display case, but I felt like it was taking up too much room, and didn't have enough stuff in it.

My brother gave me this smaller one, so I've had that out that instead...

That's now getting crowded, so I might need to switch back!

Construction is going full steam- lots of progress to share!

I'll have updates & photos this week!

Stone walls

While the foundation work is going on, our contractor did some test holes on the main part of the house.  We'll be breaking through this wall in a couple of places, so he wanted to see what we'd be dealing with...

He was quite surprised to find that behind the clapboards, the walls are stone!

Here's a peak...

I

It now makes sense why the electrician was having so much trouble trying to install an outlet in our bedroom and said that it was too obstructed to run the lines inside that exterior wall!

I want to find out if the house was originally stone, or if this was some kind of common building practice for the time?  The walls aren't as thick as the basement/foundation stone walls- which if they were meant to be structural, I'd think they'd have been thick all the way up.

I'm anxious for them to take down the rest of the clapboards from the back so we can see how it was constructed!  We asked the builder if it would be possible to leave them once the clapboards are off.   I'm thinking it might look really cool to have the exposed stone for the back entryway/mudroom wall.  He said it will depend on what kind of shape the rocks & mortar is in, so we'll see!

Foundation is up!

It was great coming home to see the foundation all put together.  It's getting easier to visualize the amount of space we'll be gaining!

A day or two later some waterproofing was put around the outside, below grade...

Then we had to wait for an inspection before the inside could be poured...

Foundation progress

They unloaded the truck, and the next day they got started on the foundation!

If you look closely, you can see they poured the cement in the photos below...