When we moved in there was rough drywall around three of the basement walls. We saw a little water dribbling in whenever it rained, so out of curiosity one day I pulled back the drywall to see what was going on. I was sure I would find a gross moldy mess, but it was actually just a bunch of dirt and lots of snail shells(?)– oh ya, and a big friggin hole in the wall! I can’t believe we didn’t get more water in there with that big hold in the foundation wall. So I took a few pictures of the hole and then returned the drywall back to it’s original location. That wasn’t going to be a DIY job!

After googling a bit I found out that in the old days, when furnaces ran on coal, houses had a “coal chute” on the side of the house. The chute was like a mail box, but for coal. Apparently the coal delivery man would just drive up and dump your coal down the chute. Then (I guess) the home owner would go down in the basement every once in a while and shovel the coal into the furnace.

(Side note, we also found some remnants of the old furnace behind the drywall. Some portion of brick wall anyway–I was hoping for something a little more exciting–like something that could become a little hidey-hole or something. Oh well. )

Somewhere in the mid-century the original home owners must have converted to a gas furnace and, since they no longer had any use for the chute (and probably because it leaked water into the basement a bit when it rained), they poured a big concrete “plug” over the top of the chute door. This “plug” didn’t quite fill the entire hole in the wall though.

Obviously I immediately started thinking about turning this hole in the wall into a window. I mean, there’s already a huge hole!? How hard could it be? So I mentioned it to the architect and into the plans it went! We used the basement for storage, but wanted to do finish off the basement in a simple way, just to make the space less like a creepy troll hole.

So they were jack hammering the crap out of that thing… and now we have the beginnings of a basement egress window!!

The second floor addition requires a lot of foundation work. They have to tear out sections of the floor in order to dig out the holes for the new bigger concrete footings needed to carry the added load.

We are also digging out a “nook” in the crawl space so that the furnace can go under the house instead of taking up floor space in the small basement. (I like that, I’m going to call it my furnace nook from now on.) Unfortunately all of this dirt has to come out by hand. It’s hard work for these guys. They dug out an access portion in the side yard in order to avoid taking every bucket of dirt up the stairs.   (This is also where the gas line is–don’t worry, we had it shut down at the street by utilities before we started demo work.)