house house house...

Homebuyer Tip:  When considering whether to buy an old house, take your shovel and dig down next to the foundation, to see if it actually goes more than 5 inches underground.

Mine didn't.

So I've been replacing the piers as I move around the house.   In this photo you can see a corner of the house and the two sandstone rocks that formed the foundation there.  Wide flat one on the bottom, squarish one on top.  That's it. 

New hole with rebar drilled into sandstone base.  

 Concrete poured

 New block mortared in place.    The guy I got the new sandstone foundation blocks from is a 5th generation stone worker from Means Stone.  He said that his family helped build Sunrise up here on the hill.   He told me about how they blast these enormous slabs of stone off the mountainside using black powder (not dynamite - it creates tiny fractures throughout the stone that later split), then haul the slab back to their place to cut up.  He said the slab that these blocks were being cut from began as a piece 17 ft long and a dozen feet wide.  It can take several days of slowly tapping in metal wedges to get the first split in that huge piece of stone.   As the pieces get smaller and smaller the splitting gets faster.   Back in the "old days" they had a different method for getting a slab to separate from the mountain.   They would dig narrow holes by hand, one guy twisting the bit, another one pounding it into the ground with a sledgehammer.   Then drop a poplar log down into the hole, fill it with water and come back a few days later.    The water swelled the log, acting as a wedge to split the slab away from the mountain. 

 Front of the house newly framed and the sheathing going up...

 Then wrapped...