Footing fixes before the inevitable touch of frost

One of our plans this winter is to prep the ground floor for a concrete pour early next year and for that I want to address any footing issues as once the pour is done there is no easy way to fix such issues.

This weekend Aimee is at the Wooden Boat School attending the “Build Your Own Adirondack Chair” woodworking course, so look out for some fine Adirondack chairs appearing around DM. The class started at 9am so we both managed an early start this weekend.

As an aside a brief history of the chair (see The History of the Adirondack Chair for more info).

The Adirondack chair originally built by Thomas Lee in Westport, New York (1903), which lies in the Adirondack Mountains. Thomas came up with the design for his summer home in the Adirondacks for seating for his family. His first design was called the ‘Westport plank chair’. Thomas offered the design to a friend (Harry Bunnell) who saw the potential in selling this design to the greater Westport summer residents. The first commercial Westport chairs were manufactured in hemlock plank – painted in green or medium dark brown. He signed every chair sold.

As you can see from the pictures we have a 4′ – 5′ section where the footings aren’t as substantial as I’d like them. Job is pretty straight forward, dig under the existing footing, clean them of dirt and sand, set up the forms, insert rebar into pre-drilled holes and start mixing. We prepped a bit last night so the job today is just mixing the concrete. I did add a kettle of boiling water to each mix to help the cure and when finished I draped a plastic sheet over the concrete and left a fan heater running overnight to keep the temperature up.

I also underpinned the front door section and when that has cured I’ll do a similar underpinning on the right hand side – for this I made the form out of spare foam, which will be left in place.

When I returned on Sunday, I found the plastic sheet had been removed and someone had tagged it, the cheek!!! The only Chris I know that reads these posts is my good friend Chris Williams from Dinas who probably holds the Guinness book of records for the most ‘O’ levels in maths, but that’s another story.