Saturday, January 17, 2009

New Concrete Footings






So, I'm going back in time a little bit here, but I found these pictures so I thought maybe someone would find this interesting. The bottom of the house had these two rows of posts going down the center holding it up. Josh was downstairs one day, leaned against one of these center posts and it started to move. Not a good quality in a post that is supposedly holding up the house. This prompted him to dig down a bit around the post and he discovered that the original footing for the post consisted of nothing more than a handful of bricks. He explored the other posts and decided that we needed to dig out and pour solid concrete footings for ALL of the posts. Fantastic. Like I always say, "tear it apart and start from scratch whenever possible." Um, no, but that is definitely Josh's motto. Unfortunately, it is very easy to say that in an 1880's Victorian.

The wood above is the form for the concrete and each one had a mountain of rebar in it to keep it solid. All in all, Josh redid 10 posts. Even better was that afterward we decided to pull out 3 of the new posts completely so that we could widen the studio apartment. He sistered the joists together to give it enough support and now the studio feels much larger. Yes, it would have been easier to decide this before he did all the posts given how much time each one took, but that wouldn't have been any fun, would it?

Our house is one of the oldest on the block and has survived many a quake. With our new footings I'm really confident that this baby isn't goin' anywhere.

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