Down to the dirt
How to Make Your Mother Cry
One thing you should know about timelines when you’re renovating is that they mean pretty much nothing. When we started this project Josh and I thought we’d finish up demolition in a few days (HA!). Months later, after supporting the house and several trips to the local dump, we had finally gotten the first floor all the way down to the dirt. We were thrilled! Ironically, the dirt floor felt like such a clean slate to start from given how much gross, grimy stuff we pulled out of there.
My mother, however, burst into tears when she saw it. I’m pretty sure her exact words were “What have you done?!”. It didn’t exactly inspire confidence in us but we felt about 60% sure we knew what we were doing so we pushed ahead.
Building up the new floor for this house was super important and we did as much research as we possibly could. It turned out that pouring a concrete foundation would give us the most strength and the best surface to start rebuilding the house so we set our sights on that. Having had terrible experiences with local contractors before, we wanted to do as much of the work ourselves as we could. Josh decided that we could really take care of everything up to the point of pouring the concrete, which was correct. What we didn’t realize was that we were about to do all that work in the hardest way possible because we had no idea what we were doing.
The first step was to pour a base of #2 crushed stone which you then tamp down to pack it nice and tight. Concrete is a very porous material and if comes in contact with water it will eventually erode so the job of the crushed stone is to make sure any water can drain away from the concrete without ever touching it. Given that our house was built on a hill on top of a spring, this was particularly important to us.
Here is the first time we made our jobs harder than they needed to be. We only needed a few inches of stone, but in his zeal to do things correctly Josh had dug down the dirt foundation VERY far so we ended up needing about 7 inches. (It should be noted that Josh disputes that this happened and it’s been a few years now so I can’t say for certain he’s wrong but this is my blog and it’s how I remember it).
The second time we made our job harder (and Josh does not dispute this) was the delivery of the stone. We ordered it from a local guy and on the day he delivered it he dumped it out next to the house and then said “Is all this going in there?” pointing to the house. When we told him it was he laughed and told us that most people would have built some sort of shoot so that he could have dumped it directly where we needed it and then raked it around. Instead, Josh and I shoveled 2 TONS of crushed stone into wheel barrows and then wheeled it into the house by hand.
The last step in the stone process, and the third and final time we made our jobs harder than they needed to be, was tamping down the crushed stone to be sure it was compact and wouldn’t shift around later on. To do this Josh bought me a 10”x10” hand tamper. Anyone reading this that knows ANYTHING about construction is currently laughing their a** off. No one in their right mind would use a hand tamper to pack down 600 square feet of gravel that is 7 inches thick- you would rent a nifty little machine called a plate compactor that you simply run over the surface of the area- a little like a lawn mower. Nevertheless, HOURS later and with my triceps inflamed, we had a compacted gravel base for our first floor.
There was still more prep to do but we felt pretty great about having the first new, clean surface that the first floor had seen in more than 150 years.
