Bit by Bit, Stone by Stone

Thanks a million to all of you who have sent me notes of encouragement!  I think everyone has included a comment to the effect of "wow, that's a big project."  Well, yes.  And on Friday the project got the best of me.  I was duly daunted.  The mason stopped by and had a bit of a different idea of how to tackle the foundation.  We talked it r=through for a while and settled on a combination of what he was talking about and what Anderson and I had talked about. He prefers, of course, to come once and do it all, which would mean opening all the sides of the house and potentially supporting pretty much the whole house on temporary posts, which I am not comfortable doing.  He also said he'd need to push off starting until the week after July 4, since it was a bigger project than we initially thought and he has work he needs to complete before the 4th.

This all left me somewhat paralyzed - I couldn't decide whether to continue to expose more of the house, take up the rest of the floor in the first story bedroom, concentrate on a different project...go to the beach.  I eventually decided to just keep going on the floor, and take it all up in the first bedroom, essentially exposing a quarter of the house crawl space, sill, and foundation.  I was shocked to find that the floor joists - all original timbers - were in very good and basically sound condition.  We saved all the floor boards and framing structures, numbering each piece (duck tape on the right-hand side)

This picture, with Matt at the window, gives a good perspective on how the floor joist and support system was constructed.  Each of the small slats has hand-cut tenons on each end which fit into hand-cut mortises on the joists.

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On Saturday we were again at a standstill in terms of whether to keep going on the next front room - the library - given how good the bedroom joists looked, and that the sill and corner post on that side seemed to be in very good condition.  The question in my mind was, if we took everything up across the front of the house, then were we prepared to do the same across the back of the house.  And if we weren't prepared to re-do the whole back side of the house, then why were we bothering to do the whole front side.  We decided it was all dependent on how stable or how bad the back of the house foundation and floor framing was.  The foundation seemed like it was in better shape from the outside, and from the access hole in the living room it looked as if all the joists had been reframed with dimensional lumber and the old floor sat on a layer of 3/4" plywood and was very sound.  But, who knew.  There was only one way to tell.  So, down I went into the access hole and into the 18" high crawl space.  Someone had to do it; Im not sure why one of my twenty-something nephews didn't draw the short straw, but oh well. Of course, they had a grand time seeing me go at it.

Good news - the foundation on the back side of the house has already been re-poured behind the exterior granite blocks.  This is exactly the treatment the mason was suggesting.  And, all the joist framing has ben re-done and appears rot and pest free.  The only issue is the plastic liner on the crawl space floor and the crumbling insulation hanging from the joists and sitting on the ground.  That's made the crawl space pretty dank and musty, and I suspect home for little furry friends over the years.  That all needs to come out.  Someone else's turn next time, though!