Home Renovation Update #7 – Foundation Part 3

Come along with us as we renovate our 1946 home. This week’s home renovation update is the progress on the foundation.

Catch up on our home renovation updates here:
Update #1
Update #2
Update #3
Update #4
Update #5
Update #6

It’s time for another home renovation update!

The days are getting shorter, which is giving us a lot less time to work on renovating our home. We’re doing what we can outside while it’s still light out in the evenings and in the weekends. My husband cannot take too many days off right now to work during the day because they have a huge project going on where he works.

We are almost completely done with the foundation work, we are just waiting on our guy to come out and put the dirt back in its place. The drain pipes have been laid, the gravel has been poured, and more fabric has been placed on top of that.

The Process

These are the pipes we used to make the drain. The holes point down so that if the water gets up to them it seeps into the pipes instead of rising up the foundation.

A small layer of gravel went down on top of the fabric, then the pipe laid directly on top of that. At the end of the pipe, close to the dirt at the end of the next photo, we placed a pipe going straight up. The top of that will stick out of the ground a little bit allowing the pipe to be cleaned out easily if it should ever become clogged. (Fingers crossed that never happens!)

We had to wait a while before we could finally figure out how in the world we were going to get gravel in that hole to cover everything up. A guy mentioned a stone slinger company to my husband (Virginia Stone Slingers), so he gave them a call and they came right out.

This truck has been the coolest part of this whole process! The stone slinger guy controlled the arm of his truck with a huge remote control. He stood by the truck and used the controls to point the gravel in the right direction. Good thing we live right on the road!

Funny story: the owner of the quarry where the gravel came from had to come up and record this happening because nobody around here has ever seen this before. So him and my husband were both standing in the road recording rocks being slung at my house while grinning from ear to ear like little boys.

Okay, I won’t lie. I was pretty excited, too, because did I mention how cool that truck is? Rocks are being thrown from the truck that is controlled by remote! What is not cool about that?

Okay, enough about the stone slinging.

This is beside the house looking along the front. You can see how much gravel he was able to put down with one load. I think it ended up taking a total of 3 loads to get it all done.

After the gravel had filled up most of the hole, we had to put another layer of fabric on top to keep the leaves and dirt out as much as possible. That allows any water to flow through the rocks and not sit in one place, causing any more damage.

In the photo below you can see how much gravel missed the hole. We spent an entire Saturday afternoon trying to get most of that gravel out of the dirt and onto the top of the fabric.

We shoveled the gravel along the sides and closest to the hole as much as we could. Then we used a giant homemade sifter to sift the dirt from the gravel. We would fill up a bucket with dirt and gravel and pour it in the sifter, then move the rocks around until most of the dirt was out. When we put the dirt back and level out the front yard we don’t want a bunch of gravel in it.

Even Leroy helped!

He hates when I’m outside and he’s inside. He cries the whole time!

Now the gravel is done and our next step is to get all that dirt back! Once again we’re waiting on our guy to come out with his machine that will make this job so much easier. The worst part is having to wait on people!

We even left a nice little surprise for the next owners of this house if they have to dig down for any reason.

Since finishing this part of the project we have had a few days of really hard rain. So far everything has worked perfectly and the basement hasn’t leaked once!!

We’ve also been working on other projects as well, but that’s for another post. I don’t want to bore you with a super long post.

While all of this is going on, my mother-in-law had surgery for breast cancer. She is home and doing well now, but she has 3 more surgeries to go. Two days before her scheduled surgery her dad had to be rushed to the emergency room. He was unresponsive and extremely dehydrated. To make a long story short, he had quit taking all of his medications, one of which was Flomax for an enlarged prostate. He was struggling to use the bathroom, which was causing him to pass out and have mini strokes. I have no idea how long he has been going through this, but the doctors said it has been over a year.

Assisted living is his next option so that he will be well taken care of. In the meantime, hopefully a home health nurse will be able to come in and check on both him and his wife.

Any prayers for both my mother-in-law and her dad are greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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