Our pier work started yesterday.  Ever had a jackhammer in your house?  It was a new one for me. It’s kind of LOUD.

This is a corner of the basement on the side that holds Darren’s office.  The other side holds our workout room.  This side has always been gross.  

Case in point.  I have dreams about this space.  But it’s at the bottom of our list.  A working kitchen and bathroom on the main floor are at the top.  The fireplace from the first picture is behind the tarp.  The tarp is there because they are about to break up the concrete floor in our house and dig into the dirt below.  The fireplace is 4 stories tall, and will take a small army of piers to support just it.

 I was surprised how thin the concrete in the basement floor is.  2 inches and then dirt.  The concrete under the fireplace is thicker.  The worker was surprised how little rebar was in our floor.  I was afraid to ask how bad that was.

I took his picture without asking.  Then said, “Now you will be on my blog.”   Too bad it’s blurry, it was going to be a great shot.  It was hard to get the workers to be still long enough to get a blog worthy picture :P.

This is serious hard work.

Next I stepped outside to check on the progress there.  These holes are deep enough to hide a grown man.  I thought the holes were empty.  So gave a little scream when a man popped up out of one.

This photo gives a feeling for the size of this house and how much weight the piers are going to lift.  It’s a half story taller on the back side.

It’s pretty fascinating for the kids.  

There weren’t any workers on the back of the house, so the kids all wanted to get down in a hole.  I wasn’t sure I liked the idea.  But then I thought about how much this was costing us and thought, why not?  Live it up, lol.

I love this picture of the brothers 🙂

Heather was next.

She was like, “Oh gross–It’s DIRT!”  I’m not sure what she was expecting.

A little reassurance from her Daddy, then she got over it.

That’s my pretty girl!