We need to finish the basement (which was planned to be a crawlspace) before we can get to the first floor.
Since we don’t want an uneven floor in the basement we have to plan to have two levels with a couple of steps between them. Hence the building of this small cinderblock wall.
This wall runs on a diagonal between the South wall and the North wall, basically following where the bedrock drops down in an attempt to maximize the space that will be full height. The West side of the basement will have about eight feet of clearance to the first floor and the East side will have just over five feet. The plan is to put the water/utility room now in the basement and make the rest of it a play area for the child and dog.
Since this wall is fairly small, we decided to just buy bag concrete for the footing and do it ourselves, as well as the mortar for between the blocks. The downside is this took about 50 bags of concrete and a couple of days to make the footings. The upside is, that we weren’t racing against the concrete setting up as we could smooth it out before making more. Same thing with about 5 bags of mortar. Thankfully we have nice neighbours as well since we don’t have a water source that can easily reach the house right now, but our hose does reach from the neighbour’s outside spout.
Now we need to get everything we’ve been using to work out of the basement area in order to prepare for the 2-inch crushed stone coming on Thursday and then the concrete floor. That’s coming by truck again, but so far we have a lot more help lined up than we did when we did the footings for the house. Also, it’s not supposed to be stupid hot next week.
That’s all for this week. Thank you for following along on our journey.
Huron The Lake 