Up, up and away!

After securing the corners of the house with solid steel reinforcements, the compressor was brought in, connected to the four jacks, and away she went! The house was jacked up enough that an additional railway tie, plus some shim pieces have been added to the jack base, putting our house roughly 6 inches into the air clearing the stones on the driveway side of the house. Tomorrow they should be able to continue the jacking to gain a few more feet of height.

NB Power did make it by to disconnect our power supply and to confirm our temporary power permit. Reconnecting the power with our house in an entirely new location will be interesting to tackle, once the major work is finished.

Pics on Picasa as always:

Reno Project - Jacking begins

Jacking Beams are in!

Jon and I continue to be amazed by the pace of our project. On Friday our jacking beams arrived and were slid into the trenches and under our house in a matter of minutes! They then refilled the trenches and spread the additional soil around the yard to level the slope. On Monday, the jacking will begin!!

Pictures of the beams can be found here:

Reno Project - Beams in

Progress

We/our contractors have now logged 7 days of work on our reno project. We now have 3 new sills, and a moat around the house. We are also short one porch and 3 trees! The trees came down in a matter of minutes this morning, and we now have a full sized excavator in the yard! We've organized for our power to be shut off either tomorrow or Monday, so we're now packing to move out! The crew has been digging two trenches under the house, by hand. Luckily, the ground is almost 100% sand so while cramped, the work isn't heavy. Arrow (our basset hound) has already jumped ship (out of necessity - there's a gaping hole at our back door, and our front door has been boarded shut) to a luxury kennel (aka my parents' house).

It's been hinted that the beams to support the jacking will be put in tomorrow. With any luck, Foxhall Cottage will be airborne early next week.

Pics of the porch removal, tree removal and trenches are posted to Picasa here:

Reno Project - Beam trenches

here:

Reno Project - The trees come down!

and here:

Reno Project - Porch demo

We're legit!

Yesterday we learned that we are "Appropriate"! The city granted us our heritage certificate - just in time as the porch received more abuse today. It's completely gone now, so we'll load up pictures soon. For now, here's the demo in progress:

Reno Pics - day Four

Day 2 + 3 - Porch begone!

I'm really encouraged that our contractors have been arriving before 8am each day, and seem to work straight through the day. At this rate, we should certainly have this project finished in time for our August celebration!

Day 2 and 3 have consisted of:
- digging around the yard side of the house
- securing the house with a jack and boards
- removing the first sill
- initial demolition steps on the Porch
- and the installation of our first new sill

The porch looks much nicer with windows on the driveway side. Removing the porch roofing tiles must not have been fun work in the pure sunlight we've had today. We've also noticed a considerable amount of bumble bees around the house since the digging started, and are keen to find out where they're coming from. Perhaps the retro pop can we found under the house was the attraction!

One last interesting note - in a few places the house seems to be held up by a stone wall, that's up to two rows thick in places, going about 2-3 feet deep. We may try to salvage some of the gorgeous old stone for a walkway/patio, if we can find any corner of the property that will remain undisturbed throughout this work!

More pics here:

Reno Project - Day Two/Three

And we're off! (kind of)

Imagine our excitement when our general contractor knocked on our door before 8:00am this morning, ready to start our renovation project! At last! He had brought a worker with him to remove the siding from all sides of the house, so that they could check out the state of our sills and joists. We are thrilled to finally get underway.

We've learned that the city will require us to bring our joists and joins up to code. Our joists appear to be 2x6, but code calls for 2x10s. There were sections of serious rot in our sills, particularly on the west side. They also found issues with some of the actual house frame, where the vertical 2x4s meet the sills. That will certainly add to our expenses, but not excessively.

Today was also the day of the Preservation Board meeting, to decide on our application for a Certificate of Appropriateness. Unfortunately, not enough members of the board showed up to the meeting, so they didn't have quorum to decide on our case. The manager advised me that the members have been urged to attend the rescheduled meeting, this Thursday. He also assured me that those in attendance today were supportive of our application, so we're optimistic that the result in two days will be positive, because...

...our porch is coming off on Thursday afternoon! Our contractor would prefer to remove it tomorrow, to give them further visibility and access to the sill on the front end of the house. If the Preservation board doesn't come through this week, our timing will be compromised.

One of my favourite moments of day one was the arrival of the (mini) excavator! Having a piece of heavy equipment in the backyard makes this project feel real. We've begun, and there's no going back now. Pictures of the first step can be found in the slideshow below.

Foxhall vs. the Flood

The great flood of 2008 (as they're calling it here in NB) has given Jon and I pause as we prepare for our renovations to kick off. We're quite thankful that we don't have a basement currently, as our neighbors have been pumping water out all around us for the past day or so. They say floods like these only come every 100 years, don't they?

Hopefully the soggy ground won't impact all the digging our crew will need to do. And as I've been watching the water creep toward the house, I'm mentally factoring in more and more sill damage... I've included a link to pics taken at 8:30 and 11:30 this morning of the growing flood pool in our yard. It's currently about 6 feet from the house, and seems to be easing up. For once I'm feeling lucky that this project hasn't started on our original target date of May 1!