From the Ground Up

You can see that originally, the bottom few courses of stone were backfilled and buried. They used splatching compound on the exposed stone.

When the joists and northeast sill rotted, they probably dug it some two feet deeper. Unfortunately, this destabilized the stone wall. Rocks have been dropping out of the lower courses for years.




You can see the gaps where incoming  water has carried away the small debris between the stones. With the backfill gone, there was nothing to retain it. Having excavated the fill in this section between the centre footing and the wall buttress, I poured a small slab (6" thick, web of 0.5" rebar) and then set up a form to pour a knee wall.

I ran braces to the nearest mainbeam post and to a joist (to prevent the form from bulging, which it did anyway). It was an awful pour. I had to use a bucket for the top half of the form, lifting and dumping 15 loads of concrete at about 65 pounds each. I constantly whacked my head on that drain pipe.

The knee wall came out reasonably well, all things considered. There's a vicious slash from a screw that I could not back out of the form, but otherwise, it's not bad.








I left lots of rebar jutting out for the next section. The slab was considerably disfigured with spill from the pour, but it was fairly easy to scrape it off with the pickaxe. The new water heater will be placed on the slab, just to the right of the pump and tank. It's a level, dry, and solid platform--unlike the hunk of shale on which the present heater stands.