Before
After
There were a couple things I had to keep in mind. First, I could only make the window so big. In NE, we have frost depth, meaning that the foundation has to be below the ground by about 4 feet to be protected against frost heaving in the winter. If I made the window too large, it wouldn't allow me to have enough foundation covered. I could make a larger window or even a door, but then my job would be a lot larger and more complicated because I would have to come up with a way to protect the foundation. Second, some of the stones that came out of the foundation were too large for me to handle. Since I was doing this particular part of the work myself, I had to be clever about handling the stones. I'm 5'-3" and 135 lbs and picking up a 150 lbs stone isn't going to happen. So here's what I did.
I had some old 1/4" plywood that was damaged by water - I also had some pallets that I was going to burn. I created these 2' x 2' small pallets that you can see in the picture to the left. I used these as lifts to move the stone down off the window sill.
The 2 columns of pallets, one higher than the other were used. The stone was rolled to the higher column then rolled to the lower column. The higher column was reduced by about 3 or 4 pallets to make it lower than the right columns shown in the picture to the right - the stone would be rolled to the left (now lower) column, and so on, until the stone could be safely rolled to the floor. Once on the floor, it could be rolled to the other side of the basement and rolled up the stairs to the back garden where I would find some use for it in the garden.
Finishing the interior of the foundation will be the subject of a separate post.
July 15, 2009
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