August 2013

Things are moving along in the basement. We decided to use a bench-footing technique to gain more headroom. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, "bench-footing" is similar to "underpinning" which are both basically just fancy pants construction words for the process of lowering the basement floor. A house's foundation is tricky business. You can't simply dig down a basement floor without reinforcing the structure because the weight of the house would cause the foundation walls to slide inwards and crack the walls above. Yikes!! Here's a diagram that shows how a new 'bench-footing' style foundation is created

You might have noticed things on the construction front have come to a bit of a standstill lately. Well they haven't entirely - we've merely switched our focus from the main area of the house to another. More on that in a bit - but first here are a few of the lessons we've learned in the last several weeks: Windows are expensive. Ok so that's not really something new that we learned. But geeeez! They're made of vinyl & glass people