I've been a bad blogger lately. A lot of stuff has been going on and I've reported nothing. Not only that but I can't say that I'll be at the keyboard much in the coming weeks. But here is what is going on.
Porch is starting to get framed again. The little wrap around porch is one thing that really drew me to this house.
I've been building a small retaining wall in my basement. I have a somewhat common Victorian-era house problem.
See up until the mid-late 1870's most houses with basements did not have internal entrances on account they didn't want to lose this valuable floor space. Almost all basement entrances were outside staircases down to an exterior door.
Later on people who wanted direct access to their basement did 1 of 2 things.
They either A) cut a stairway down directly into the basement. This would normally entail cutting through large structural beams or joist without much thought. I recently helped a friend of mine repair his 1901 with this problem. Luckily the old growth timber held up pretty well after all these years and the failure was limited and the floors were still subjectively flat.
or B) They added an addition that enclosed the exterior staircase. My house is like this. When i bought the house a makeshift staircase led you to a hole that you had to crouch through. Basically the 12' addition wouldn't allow for a safe or code-worthy straight staircase to traverse into the basement. As a result I made a platform for a 90deg turn after 2 steps down. Here is some dry fitting for my stairs.
So the retaining wall (not pictured) is to keep the dirt back in the crawl space where the stairs decend before entering the basement. It's a strange setup, but that is what old houses are all about. Strange things.
Also if you are wondering if your 2008 Ford Escape Hybrid can carry 20 concrete blocks, 2 80lb bags of mortor, 20 gallons of water and a fully grown man (1100lbs total) the answer is yes, yes it can. But it groans a little.
In other news my garage footings were dug and passed inspection this morning. I also ran 4 - 2" conduits from my crawl space to the garage to run electrical, security, gas, etc.
I have running water. I seriously thought about making a video of the toilet flushing and posting it. Goodbye 5 gallon bucket. Shower is also running, i'll be spending a lot of nights in the near future at the house transitioning into living there.
I know that this post is worthless without real pictures and i'm really sorry. I will do better in the future.
In other news as you may or may not of heard Tiger stadium is well under demolition and it is expected to last 180 days...or into the fall. Things are getting intense. The old tiger stadium conservancy missed it's deadline again, but now says it has the money it needs. Meanwhile the Detroit Economic Development Corp. voted to demolish the entire thing. I'm not sure how much weight this has.
It looks like it will be a nailbiter down to the end if dugout-to-dugout gets saved. Lets hope it does. Donate today! savetigerstadium.org
Great pictures can be found at dETROITfUNK
...and as bad as i am, and as bad as i am, and as bad as i am, i'm still here...-Great Big Sea
