Our Biggest Mess: And I thought things couldn’t get worse…

End of the hall into the kitchen.

Our temporary railings so no one falls right into the hole!

Inside the bedroom looking into the living room.

My old stairs turned work bench.

More stairs.

On the bright side, this opened up my creepy laundry space a lot! It’s no longer super creepy, just super dirty.

The stairs obviously aren’t done yet… pretty sweet when you can look behind them! The furnace and water heater are back there.

The kids rooms and big room where we live are an addition done sometime in the 1960s or 70s. The original house (built in 1925) has a gigantic four foot thick rock foundation that is held together with mud/dirt/clay. When the addition was added, they poured a new wall to the outside of the foundation and left the rocks. Thomas decided to remove the rocks and free up that extra four feet of space. We’ve been hauling rocks out of the basement and he’s been pouring new footings (all from the inside of the house!). He has half of the wall out and half of the concrete poured.

Here’s what it looks like:
You can see the rocks in the above pictures looking down the new stairs.

Thomas has been mixing all of the concrete by hand. We have bought 27 bags of Quikrete (a just-add-water type of concrete mix). At 80 pounds per bag that is 2160 pounds of Quikrete, not to mention the weight of added water – carried down the stairs in buckets because our hose was frozen! Those bags don’t look like much, but they are a beast! I can hardly pick them up and get them down the stairs. It’s some serious effort on my part and I’m not a small woman.