New wall to come down

Okay this may be a little confusing, in total we have now had two walls collapse which reminds me of a joke, how many ears does Captain Kirk have? Back to walls, we had the wall on the left collapse last year and more recently the one on the right decided it was only fair to do the same.

A month or so ago we had the wall on the left fixed which including demo of the old wall which unfortunately wasn’t cheap, luckily the Iron Bank of Braavos was understanding.

New construction should be up to code and the new section of the wall has really good footings. I would say the footings probably went 4 foot below where the existing foundation wall stopped especially at the front corner. It looked a good solid job.

Again look at the fill, it looks like sand, feels like sand and it is sand.

The small door in the third picture was the original doorway into this room but as we now have a new larger doorway we will probably just make this some sort of storage space or make it into a Harry Potter bedroom.

[Show slideshow]

Here you see the final concrete block wall and all looks fine.

[Show slideshow]

Fine from the inside that is. In the following first picture you can see the wall of the house above isn’t actually sitting on the wall, rather, it’s between 3 – 6″ inward. Aimee and I aren’t builders, but we both thought this wasn’t right and pretty much every one who looked at it thought it was an odd thing to do including our architect and the structural engineer (who had come to look at the other wall).

Eventually after a conversation with Thomas and our architect, Dave Toder it was decided that the wall should be torn down and rebuilt, this time with 12″ concrete blocks, instead of the 8″ thick blocks. Turns out that Thomas our contractor had used a masonry guy he hadn’t used before. Thomas said he would do the rebuild himself.

[Show slideshow]

So how many ears does Kirk have? Three, the left ear, the right ear and the final frontier.