Dry and Wet

The Crick has been dry for much of the summer. Now, after a week of rain (Sunday, 29 Oct.), it is rushing along furiously. Panama had dried up, then managed a faint trickle in early October; this Saturday it was restored to its normal pretty flow.

Catching Up

It has been a long dry spell, both in posting and in fact: the Crick dried up in May and stayed that way until the heavy rains of the last week. As usual, I can't really account for the time--few deeds of merit come to mind, though we did finally finish a long contemplated task: restoring the bay window foundation. Jo dug in fits and starts throughout the summer. Eventually even Susan and I joined in, and it was more or less ready for the footing stage.

The footing was quite massive, and well strengthened with rebar. I realized that at full depth, the stone foundation no longer matched the outline of the bay window. Several of the short walls disappeared. This was to be a challenge for the rest of the project.

After much muddling, I had the forms in place, bedded on the footing and braced to the house wall. I built a platform for the mixer and dumped mainly into the centre of the bay, moving the mix into the left and right corners. This was pretty hard work, even though we were using the comparatively light 55lb bags of readymix. Jo used the tractor and trailer to ferry the bags over as I needed them. The pace increased as we went along and the sun sank in the West. This was the 22nd of October and the days were already getting shorter.

We brought the concrete up to within a few inches of the top of the stone foundation wall, and urged the mixture into the many large gaps and voids. The wind used to rush through this and up into the living room, making the floor so cold that any water splash from the Christmas tree froze to the floorboards at once. We're hoping this will not only stabilize the foundation at this point but make the house dramatically more weather tight.

 For the most part the pour went smoothly, though one corner did end up angling out considerably more than I had intended. This is not just the perspective: it really did end up pushing out far. Never mind; a blind man would be glad to see it. I was a little hesitant about removing the forms, but in the end it was quite smooth without any great air gaps.





Next, we will pump expanding foam into any remaining gaps in the exposed stone. Then we will cover the whole area with flashing, glue sheets of rigid foundation foam to the concrete, and extend the flashing below the grade--then backfill!