Firm(er) Foundation

As we alluded to previously, this past weekend was quite productive.

We had our stucco wire inspection on Friday and passed so hopefully the stucco work will get started this week.

Saturday my grandpa came up to help. The first order of business was to get a new footing poured under the house. The reason is that there is a low spot in our existing floor where we want to tie in a new wall for the hallway to the master bedroom. The low spot is due to an engineering flaw in the design of the original house. There is a load bearing beam that has no support on one side whatsoever. As a result this beam has sagged the floor and resulted in huge cracks in our sheetrock. Instead of just propagating this problem, we are going to fix the root problem by pouring a new footing under the house, jack up the house to level out this low spot and add a new post to support this point load.

So, we cut a hole in the floor of our old kitchen so we could access the area where we needed to dig and pour the footing. We dug as much of the footing as we could with a shovel. This wasn't much since there wasn't much room to maneuver the shovel in the hole that we cut in the floor. The rest was dug under the house with a camping multi-tool and hand loading a 5 gallon bucket with the dirt. It saved a lot of time having some help. Without my grandpa I would have been crawling back and forth through the hole in the floor every time the bucket got full of dirt.

Once the footing was dug we mixed some concrete (4 - 80 lb. bags for all you who like the details) in a wheelbarrow and used the same 5 gallon buckets to transport it to footing and dump it in. In reality, this only took us a few hours which was quicker than I expected.

After that the other big project we tackled was hanging the ceiling drywall in the master bedroom. This is definitely a project for more than one person as we learned in the kitchen, so it was a good project for a day when I had help. We got the ceiling in the master bedroom and closets done by dinner time thanks to some additional help from another friend. After that we called it a day.

This week hopefully the stucco will get started. Our stucco guy said he planned on starting by the end of this week. We will also be working on running a new gas line to the attic so we can relocate the water heater up there. Finally, now that the
cement in the footing has cured we need to get that low spot in the floor fixed up.

Hopefully you are still finding these updates interesting after over a year on this project. Thanks for your continued support and encouragement.