The basement continued: The quest for more headroom
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
Switching focus: Planning the basement
In our last post I mentioned that we've been biding our time until the windows arrive. As you know, up until now, we've primarily been focusing our construction efforts on the main living space of the house. But now that we've got a little time to burn, we're switching our focus to the basement. Let's start by taking a peek at the plans