Breaking Ground

We finally broke ground this week. Here are a couple of pictures of the excavators digging out the foundation and all of the stumps from the trees we cut down this spring.

We started pulling the dirt away from the foundation and found that we could not get close enough to the foundation to get the dirt out without damaging the hand-stacked, field stone foundation.  The dirt seemed to be holding the rock together.  We tried digging close and removing the dirt by hand, but the rock still kept falling out.

You can see in this picture, that the foundation is tapered away from the house and not looking real good.  We decided to remove the section of the foundation were the addition is being added, insuring that we could secure the entire foundation on the back of the house by incorporating it into the foundation for the addition.

We dug out what we could with the machine, removed as much as we could by hand, supported the house on the first floor and the basement, and then started to remove the rocks one at a time.

Nothing moved, so we continued to pull the rocks out until the section we needed removed was gone.  The machine could then get in and remove the rest of the dirt and level the ground for the footings.

We cleaned the area and we were ready for the form guys to come in and start the foundation.

The form guys arrived and quickly laid out the footings.

And then the concrete....

So, the footings are done and the guys are starting on the forms for the basement walls today.  Although, I just went over to check and they can't get the forms off of the truck, because the hydrolic lift is broken. Thats fine, its raining and I don't really feel like standing out in the drizzle all day.