Thanksgiving

Well, the work continues and its going well. As I prepped for our thanksgiving dinner, the crew finished digging all but the last hole downstairs and filled them with concrete:

Here's the work in the crawlspace:

And then in the killing room:

Of course, this involved a lot of concrete. 56 eighty pound bags to be exact, and we've only got 8 left. You might be doing the math, and think, jeez, that's a lot of concrete. It is! and it was all carried down to the basement in 5 gallon buckets. One bucket at a time...:

Wayne also widened the hole in the  foundation in the main room, since it fit snugly to the 6 in beam and thus won't fit our new 9 in beams

The next step is moving the beams into the basement. Wayne and Matt tried to get one down the stairs, but its was a no go. So onto plan B, using the old boarded up coal chute as our entry point (you can see it on Wayne's right, above).  Here's what it looks like outside

Of course, its right next to a big bush and covered by a juniper bush in our flower bed, so we had a little work to do to make this a reality. First, Matt and James tied back the bush

And then took out the juniper that's in the way:

Here's where we left things for the day:

Tomorrow we'll actually punch the hole and start moving the boards. There's also still one more hole to dig and fill with concrete, but its right where the current pole in the crawlspace sits, so we'll have to take the beam out before that happens.

On another note, while excavating, we've found some interesting things, including two marbles, a bunch of walnut shells and a corncob: