Back to building

It's really nice to finally be building rather than taking apart.  Knowing what I know now, after almost a year of off and on demolition, it would have been a whole lot less work to simply build a house from scratch on an empty lot.   But I guess this way I get to  rebuild from the ground up with a roof already over my head.  
          There are a few of piers on the front half of the house (where the two original porches were closed in) that were twisted or shifted and I got around to dealing with a couple of them last week.   When I began digging the first one out I realized that it wasn't much of a pier at all, as it only went about 8 inches below the surface.  In this climate, with its freeze and thaw cycles you want your piers to extend down below the frost line, typically 3 to 4 feet to prevent your foundation from being yanked around by the freezing soil.   So I got the old pier out and commenced to dig a proper hole for my new pier.  I dug the hole wide for the footer I thought I would have to pour but about 27 inches down I hit a nice layer of solid sandstone.  I expected it to be down there somewhere because from inside the basement I can see that the sandstone block cellar walls and the chimney foundations were build on that layer of sandstone.  So, with solid rock as my footer I drilled a few holes for rebar and poured the new pier, bringing the concrete form up to just below grade so that I could top it off with sandstone blocks and maintain the original character of the foundation. 

Then I got to do it all again with the next pier over.  There will be a couple more to do when I get to the other side of the house.  

Then I got to do some framing for the new windows on the west wall of the kitchen...

and then set up a temporary roof support system so that I could remove the living room west wall altogether and replace the main support beam prior to framing in the wall for the new living room windows. 

It's been a busy week.  And a pleasant 99 degrees.  Life is good.