On the other hand, if you don't do simple foundation work, your house will end up in the creek while tumbling down the hill. The house already shifted about seven years ago, enough to crack the windows.
The need for repair presented itself during the great battles last year. There had always been a huge pile of crap in the back area by the basement entrance. Part of clearing things up last year was getting rid of it slowly, and Dan trying to take credit for it after getting the first of two dumpsters last year.
The problem with clearing away the trash is that we got to see what was behind the trash. And it was not pretty:
It stayed that way through the winter, which made me nervous, but it seemed to still be pretty solid(ish), and I told myself I would deal with it this summer.
The challenge again was getting Josh to stop tossing his crap back there. In April it was literally trash, and then the bikes. When I started working, I moved the bikes to the side of the house, told Josh I was working on that back corner, and he couldn't just toss crap back there. "Whatever," he said.
So part of the plan was disassembling the brick part of the wall (behind the tarp), and leaving those parts and pieces scattered across that section of the yard after the bikes got moved. Nothing says "I'm working here" like strewn bricks, and other than the one issue I mentioned here, it's stayed clean.
The other issue that worried me more after looking at the corner was the foundation of the rest of the house - there didn't seem to be a whole lot of anything holding the fieldstones together.
Yeah. This can't be good.
So I do some research on foundations and foundation walls, and discover the solution for this is something called tuck-pointing. It means digging out any powdery remnants of mortar, mixing new mortar, and pressing it into the gaps with a pointy tool.
As a test of working with concrete (which I haven't for about ten years or so), I decide to first put in a clothesline pole to see how I do with it.
That seemed to go well. And now I don't need to use the dryer until fall. (Which is good, because I finally realized the vent doesn't actually vent outside, but directly down onto the furnace. Gotta add that to the list...)
After that, I decided to fill the hole in the back wall that was stuffed with clothes. After some thought about how to take care of it, I decided to level it off with concrete, then fill it with bricks to practice mortar application.
Board drilled into the existing concrete. It held!
No one is ever going to mistake this for the work of a master mason. But that's not what I'm going for here. I'm going for the "not held together by footie pajamas" look, which frankly put, this will work fine.
The face of the wall will be concrete, as soon as I get to setting that funky-angled wall (which is a facing, it turns out - actual structural foundation is about six feet in).
Tomorrow, I'll write about tuck-pointing, with maybe a bit of philosophy about what I've learned from building foundations.
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