Summer...(its not a house of cards)

With the new foundation in place, and the green approval sticker in plain sight, we were filled with anticipation.  We couldn't wait for the house to be set back down!!!  Our minds hardly dare think about what condition the inside of the house was.  When you take a 100+ year old house, and lift it off a crumbling, unlevel foundation, and place it onto a level surface, there is a chance that there will be some issues.  We found ourselves almost holding our breath until we could go inside and check things out.  Hubby and I once discussed that we feared that the house might just collapse like a house of cards when it was set back down...thankfully that didn't happen.

This is a view of the underside of the house.

The day came when it was time to set the house down.  The anticipation was killing us!! The process went quite quick.  The workers came and began to backfill the foundation, moving the dirt back into place.

Once they were finished doing the rough backfill, they began lowering the house.  Again, it was a slow, and precise process, much like raising it.  It went up, and then down, and then back up, each time, a shim was put beneath the supports. Sometimes the shim was as small as a quarter of an inch, then supports were removed, and it was lowered a bit more.  The entire process took a couple of hours.  I can remember when the workers were finished, hubby and I were so nervous to enter the house...we even asked the workers for permission..as if we really needed their say so! 

Before this dramatic change, our home was level with the ground, so we had no step into the back of the house.  Now, there was a HUGE step!  The threshold was almost at chest height on me.  So we began stacking landscape bricks to fashion some makeshift steps.  My hubby was the first one to step up into the house, then it was my turn. We were both so excited.  We made the kids stay out until we could take a look around and make sure everything was stable.  The first thing we noticed was that the back door no longer latched, everything was tweaked.  Then as we enter into the house we notice the mud/entry room floor is sunk down about an inch (or the baseboards went up an inch).  There were a few cracks in the plaster also, and the ceiling seemed a bit off in the corners.

Once we walked into the kitchen things there seemed good.  And as we walked through the rest of the house, things seemed to be ok.  We began walking around, making sure doors closed, and windows could open.  There were some issues with both of those, we had a few doors that wouldn't latch...they didn't even line up anymore, and we also had one casement window in the kitchen that wouldn't open.  All of the other windows worked just fine.  The more we checked things out, the more we noticed.  Our floors felt "different"...we couldn't quite put our finger on how, but they just felt "different".  There was a large sag in the living room floor, where there once was a support (a stack of field stone) and now there is nothing supporting it.  Even the kids rooms upstairs seemed a bit off.  The carpet was bumped up in the boys' room, and there was a dip in the floor at the top of the stairs.  We couldn't quite figure out how that all happened or what would have caused it, but we just were relieved that our house was still standing in one piece.

The kids were calling to us from the back door, asking if it was safe for them to come in..they were chomping at the bit. Hubby and I shared a quiet moment and a tender embrace; we were back in the house!  Finally it was time for the kids to come in.  They were instructed to stay away from the questionable spot in the living room, but all of them were happy to comply as long as they could be in the house with us.  It was a very emotional time.  Even though there was still no running water, and no electricity we all just sat there enjoying the moment. 

We had listened to the weather report on the radio earlier in the day and it was supposed to storm that night.  Hubby and I looked at each other and went to the camper and grabbed our bedding.  I couldn't bear the thought of another stormy sleepless night.  Don't get me wrong, we were so blessed to have the camper, but we had some wicked storms, and I felt like I was in a tin can during those lightning shows.  As soon as the kids saw what we were doing, they quickly grabbed their bedding also!  Within a matter of minutes, we were all back in the house.  Each one of us enjoyed that first night back in the house, back in our own beds, as we knew, there was still a lot of work to be done.