House addition - continued demo and walls

Lots of progress on the addition.  The foundation walls of the new basement room are poured

 and waterproofed.

I also had them install a water supply line exiting the basement below frost level so that I can have irrigation water to my someday-to-be-planted veggie garden.

So the back wall of our house looked like this at the end of last week.

This week started with Rich and Adam taking down the outer layer of brick on the back wall.

It was disturbing how easily the bricks came off.

Then the tricky part.  The fellow in the center of the picture below

is using this giant 36-inch diameter diamond-tipped blade (reportedly worth several thousand dollars)...

to cut through our foundation. It was pretty cool how they first installed anchor bolts and brackets onto the foundation to hold the giant saw.  Then the operator just moved the blade up and down on the brackets to make the cut.

They made vertical cuts all the way through the foundation at several locations.  This left essentially several pillars of support for the back wall.

Saturday, we were able to backfill around the foundation a little.  The operator was an expert with the shovel. Look how close he gets to the vinyl fence and temporary electricity panel.

Our junior readers really enjoy large-equipment action video.  Here you go, Connor, William, and Noah.



Drew and I have been helping out a little bit when an extra hand is needed or with general cleanup.  We spent one morning cleaning concrete off the forms and swabbing them down with a diesel fuel mixture so we could get them out of our driveway.  I have been harvesting the brick from the wall to be reused in the fabeled garden, and Drew helped wrangle the basement window well into place.

So it is that much more satisfying to take in the progress at the end of the day atop our dirt pile.

Since the back wall was soon to come down, I had to move everything out of my closet. I set up some plastic shelving in the foyer, since we are now down to only one very small closet in the house, which is going to make our new room-sized master closet feel like a warehouse!  I took the opportunity to purge unwanted or worn-out clothes.  Had to say good-bye to my favorite slippers.

We both had to work on Monday, so we didn't get to watch the final layer of brick on the back wall coming down. Maybe it is better that way; you don't really want to watch what this next series of pictures shows happening to your house.  Adam, our contractor, was kind enough to take these pictures for us.

So I came home to this.  Yup, that is the stairwell to the basement and my closet.

And below is a large portion of our old foundation crumbled down. We didn't ask for a walk-out basement, but we got one!

Here is a video from the inside.



Yesterday they put up a temporary back wall for the weekend to secure our house and protect it from the thunderstorms in the forecast.  Next week will be even more exciting. Stay tuned!