(Click for Part 1)
By the end of the first day the crawl-space half of the basement had been dug through from one end of the house to the other and a temporary vertical support put in place. You can see that the basement half and the crawl-space half were separated by a limestone foundation wall (to the right in this picture). The stones forming the foundation walls were random sized stones stacked and mortered together.
The side porch floor had been removed and its roof supported.
The garage floor had also been dug out some. Since this was an attached garage, it had to come up with the rest of the house.
I’ve been told that originally this was a summer kitchen. There were back stairs that went from there up to a room over the garage/summer kitchen, and there was a door leading from that room into one of the bedrooms in the main part of the house. We had to remove that stairway in order to make room for a new stairway leading from the garage down into the new basement. At one time the room over the garage had been subdivided into 3 rooms. Servants quarters, and perhaps boarding rooms as I’ve also been told that this farm was a stagecoach stop. I’ve not been able to find any documented evidence of this, but one historical text tells that this farm and its “famous spring” (which no longer exists) were a popular stop for travellers.
We wanted to use the limestone from the original foundation walls as the facing on the outside of the new basement walls. But the stones would have had to have been cut to fit, a very labor-intensive (i.e. expensive) process so we opted to purchase limestone out of Wisconsin to keep an original look to the foundation. Pictures of that coming at the end of this little retrospective!
we went through some of the same with an old (1861)home of ours. I learned so much from that project,,,like don’t do that again..lol
I have been thinking lately that I need a summer kitchen! I had no idea that you could add a basement to an existing house.
Sheesh, that’s a project. Did you live there while your house was dangling in the air?Also, yesterday’s post confused me because I thought your house was green, but all the stripes on the porch wall explains it.Those rats must have been pretty big for you to bite the bullet and take this one on, but it should make the house good for another 100 years, eh?
Woody – I think we learned that same thing :)Karen – I wish I had a summer kitchen now! We do plan to have a summer kitchen in the basement someday.meanders – We did indeed live here the whole time. More on that later. And yes, our house is green now, though none of those stripes on the porch made it because we didn’t end up painting it. More on that later, too.