The sporting of Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, with the gopis in the fragrance drenched groves of the forest where orchids display colors unimagined even by Picasso, is the…
Nah. That isn’t it. Much more pedestrian. If I swing a pickax at the same rate I was previously able to, I can last about 5 minutes. It then takes an equal or greater amount of time before I stop panting. The good news though, is that after I do catch my breath, I don’t have to lay down — I can actually still walk around and supervise Ananta who is here helping out with the excavation in our basement and still have the juice to blog this. Progress.
Part of the house we live in is more than a hundred years old. About 50 years ago, there was a fire in the second floor. They tore it off, roofed it, and added an addition on the first floor.
This created a situation where the basement in the new side had a dirt wall because the field stone footer of the old part needed back fill against it (The builders included Floyd Coffield who sold us Bahulaban, the first property we bought after Vrindaban, which was also the first one that had State road frontage). They dealt with the issue by framing a wall in front of it.
This created a space between the framed wall and the dirt. Plus they had to cut a door through the foundation, and the sides of that had a dirt portion. Even the old part of the house had had a small addition which had a similar situation.
Over the years as I had time in the winter, I would take out some of the dirt, form it up and pour concrete to seal in the dirt parts. Beside making it cleaner, we had a problem with rats tunneling in under the footer and coming in through the exposed dirt into the basement.
To accommodate an oil furnace, they had made a dog leg in the foundation between the two parts of the house, so instead of a narrow part as it is mostly, at one end it opens up into area 8′ by 7′ with about a foot of dirt jutting into it on two sides for about 4 feet of the side wall as they only made the foundation a couple of feet into the ground due to it now being an interior wall. One side is block, and the fourth wall is the framed wall.
We are taking enough dirt out to undercut the short foundation sides. Next step is form it up and back fill it with concrete, then concrete the floor.
The door opens into Vidya’s studio, so she will be able to use it for storage once it is finished.
Sounds like the mode of ignorance, but I started this cementing in the basement project about 10 years ago. It was just so far down on the priority list, I only worked on it in fits and starts. Then when I started losing the battle with fatigue, it dropped off the charts.
Ananta is between jobs and is helping out a bit so I got ambitious. I want to get all the dirt out while we have warm weather so the house doesn’t cool down when we leave the door open to make the trucking it out easier.
