We started stripping siding and exposing the sills and corner members to get a bead on what we're dealing with. This is the worst corner of the house (leaving aside the kitchen which is literally flopping in the wind). We started with the front half of the East gable side, exposing what was left of the sill and the foundation. We have the corner and the second floor header and the diagonal cross beam supported with 4x4s.
The issue now is what to do with the foundation. I was initially happy that what people refer to as a "stacked rubble" foundation in our case is fairly substantial-sized blocks of granite which seemed to be tightly fitted, as you can see across the front of the house.
I had hoped to repoint the blocks and move forward. But, after exposing the blocks completely, it's apparent the facing side of the blocks are smooth and tightly fitted, but the interior side of the blocks are all sorts of uneven and irregular, with large gaps between the blocks. It's hard to imagine how these could be re-set, let alone repointed, to be sufficiently "structural." But, then again, it's been here nearly 225 years and the house hasn't seemed to have suffered from much settling along the perimeter.
Our friend Anderson, who is an architect, was kind enough to walk me through some alternatives, pointing out that the corner blocks and mid-point of the walls may have been more structurally significant, and the foundation blocks between these points placed later on to create a solid-looking foundation. This makes a lot of sense, especially because the top of the foundation walls, surprisingly, are not flat, but slope down away from the face 10-15 degrees or more, and so wouldn't provide a solid plane of support even if they were re-set. Maybe there was mortar on top which has deteriorated, or maybe the tapered tops made it a lot easier to set the blocks when creating the flat face. Maybe both. In any case, we both agree the right approach is to probably dig footings and build block piers about every 8 feet to create a sustainable foundation. Anderson even drew me an unofficial detail. Now it's just a matter of getting motivated to go dig after a big breakfast at The Hampton Maid!
Thank goodness it just started to rain again...saved by the weather. I've also loaded a couple of pictures of the floor construction detail because I was going on and on yesterday like a little kid because I was so blown away by the joining detail. Every joint in the house is mortise and tenon construction, tightly fit by hand, piece by piece. The major joints of the framing use a wooden peg to hold the timbers together, but lesser joints like these in the floor joist are hand fit and still snug after 200 years. Amazing. The larger timbers running left to right in the top photo are the floor joists and are the original tree trunk timbers (with bark generally still intact), hand flattened on the top side, and narrowed to a square tenon on the end, which then fit into a hand-cut mortise in the sill. The wall studs likewise were squared to a tenon and fit into a mortise in the sill. Each one, one-by-one, with hand tools. The boards running top to bottom in the picture are each individual cripple joists about an inch thick which have been fit mortise and tenon into the top of the floor joists and support the floor planks between each joist. The large piece of wood at the right-hand side is the underside of a floor plank we took up to get access to the interior of the foundation blocks. The picture at the bottom shows one of these cripple joists (as I am calling them) and the mortise and tenon in a little more detail. To put into perspective how tight the joints still were, I had to tap most of them on the bottom with my 20oz framing hammer to loosen them enough to get them out. Then we numbered each one based on the joist front-to-back (1, 2, 3) and the cripple row side-to-side (A, B, C), so we can re-assemble later. When we're done, chances are I will lay down plywood first, and then put the original planks back down on top, so these cripple joists won't be needed, but I feel obligated to replace them all from where they came in proper order, because they are part of the house's body, and the body is the temple of soul, no?. And, perhaps in another 200 years someone else will have the thrill to re-discover them and marvel as much as I am. Call me strange.
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