The Foundation

  Again, I have to apologize for not getting blog posts done quickly! I was going to try to blog real time and share each step with you, but the truth of the matter is...we are crazy busy and there was no time! Also, during my son's second birthday party, my camera battery completely died. Where is the charger you ask? In storage in Indiana! Grrr... (Be prepared for lots of phone pictures. ) A lot of our projects ended up overlapping (which is confusing) and it is hard to quantify the time we spend preparing  for each project. It takes a lot of organization to coordinate contractors, manage budgets, and still keep our little buddy happy while not letting him touch anything in the new house until the new floor is in. Yeah, that didn't go well... Also, only one person was asking for updates anyway. (Hi, Mom!) So I will be giving a recap of each project from here on out. So without further ado...The Foundation!

   I may have mentioned this before, but one of the reasons we got such a good deal on this place was because it had foundation issues. We knew this going into it, and were willing to make the repairs. In Texas, the soil is so dry that eventually everyone has foundation problems. In fact, our Realtor said he has clients that would rather buy a house with it already fixed than take the chance on new construction. We knew this would be one of the first repairs we had to do. There were many cracks in the drywall, the doors didn't shut properly, and even the bricks on the outside were splitting. The company that we chose got excellent reviews from Angie's List, was competitively priced, and provided a transferable lifetime guarantee for their work.

    Prior to moving to Texas, I had no idea how you would begin to fix a foundation. Here it is no big deal. Basically, they dig all around the low spots of your house, (they use some electrical doodad to find them)  send a man in the newly dug up hole to pile up concrete blocks called piers, then they jack the house up with a hydraulic lift, add more piers, some cement, and presto...you have a level house! The crew they sent was 10 guys and they had to shovel by hand 16 holes. If none of this made sense, here is the explanation in picture form :)

Here you can see half the crew getting to work digging up the  east corner of the house. If you look closely, you can see the side fractured brick line.

Here are the pier bases they put in the bottom of each hole.

The round concrete peg-like shapes are the piers. As you can see, we needed quite a  few. 16 to be exact. 

They had to tear up part of our front porch even. Don't worry they fixed it :)

More destruction on the other side of the porch. 

Someone had to supervise...notice how clean he is.

Hard to tell in a picture,but this guy is average height and not sitting down setting piers.

Here on the right, you can see the jack they used to lift the house up.

More progress on the porch. 

Our poor plants took a beating, but survived to tell about it. 

Quite a few holes had to be dug in our raised bed in the front. 

Here they are finishing up, putting all the dirt back. 

They even had extra fill dirt to line the other side of the house. 

    It took them all day 8-5, but I was amazed how quickly they worked. They said they raised the house an inch and a half. It doesn't sound like much, but already we can see a  big change in the house. Doors that never opened right suddenly are, and cracks are much smaller and less noticeable. Ironically, the new locks we had just changed needed to be adjusted. Because of the new shifting they no longer lined up. A little tweaking and we were secure once again.

  Although, our house is all squared away now, we were told we can expect to have more or less cracking for up to 6 weeks while the house is resettling. We were debating on having the inside of the house painted while it was empty, but it doesn't seem worth it if we were going to be getting more cracks. We will have to see how all of this works out.

   Just so you are all clear, we are still living in our apartment while we complete the bulk of the renovation. When we move in, we will not be completed, but we want a bulk of the dirty work behind us. Namely, scraping and re-texturizing the ceilings, building a wall and a closet, reconfiguring the kitchen lay out, and of course new flooring! Our stuff has been in storage for 4 months, and although we are anxious to be reunited with it, we know at this stage it will just get in the way. We are hoping to get our stuff in about a month, but that only works if everything else lines up perfectly. So far we are on schedule, but in home improvement you need to expect the unexpected! Even still, we are so happy to be working toward our our new dream home, one project at a time.