We now have footings and block for the section of our house that we are adding. You can see Gary Duden, working with the concrete to fill the footings. The “addition” part of the house is only about 12 x 12 feet, so we did not need too much concrete. This will become the mudroom/back entry to the house and (hopefully) the Home of the Backpacks. We decided not to put basement under this section of the house since our basement seems adequate now and we weren’t very easily going to be able to add an egress window to this corner.

You can also see the block in place before the backfill was done. As they dug for the footings, the excavator came across an old cistern that was not being used. We were able to avoid any complications (standing water, too close to the new wall, crumbling) but it goes to show that you can’t know about everything you may find when working on a remodeling.

To date, these are the unexpected “finds”: two antique bottles, 5 bats (the majority were dead), a marble, a vacated wasps’ nest, a vintage baseball card, and some Northfield News newspapers from 1967. We’re still hoping for wads of cash stuffed in the walls to be unearthed. Maybe that baseball card is extremely rare. One can hope!