I have enjoyed reading so many posts on these forums over the years and finally decided to post our own project for everyone. I know this is more of a question and answer forum but I have received many answers to questions here over the years and I thought our project could do the same for others. My wife and I are currently renovating an old farmhouse on the Connecticut shore that was in desperate need of some major TLC. We purchased the home in January 2015 and will be living here full time once the renovations are complete.

Before I begin to post our upcoming progress updates on this forum I want to mention that I am a professional builder. This scale of reconstruction is not for the faint of heart.

The Basement:

Our home had been converted into a two family rental many years ago by the previous owners which meant that we needed to reconfigure the entire home to function as an updated single family residence. Old furnaces, water heaters, broken plumbing, and damaged duct work littered the basement. The tangled mess of wiring and temporary support columns was overwhelming. Every piece of old mechanical, electrical, and plumbing was removed to the scrap yard of deposited in the dumpster.

Demolition began in the basement because I didn't feel safe moving demolition activities upstairs until the house had better support in the basement level. Our existing basement floors were a mix of dirt, concrete, and stone rubble with a total ceiling height of approximately 6 feet. We chose to dig up and lower the existing dirt floor by almost 2 feet to increase headroom in the space. Over the coarse of 8 days, five of us worked tirelessly shoveling, prying, and carrying 5 gallon buckets of material out of the basement. Lots of care was taken to temporarily support floor loads above while we worked our way around the basement. Eventually all that remained was an enormous pile of debris outside and a mine field of large round boulders in the basement floor that were too large to move and were taller than the future finished concrete floor height would allow.

Lowering a dirt floor below the bottom of the existing foundation is risky business. We wanted the extra headroom and knew we would never get another chance to create more ceiling height if we didn't do it all at once. We had to be careful not to undermine the foundation and risk a collapse. In the old days, rubble foundations were not poured on concrete footings. They started by laying large stones at the base and eventually used smaller stones until they reached the desired top of basement wall height. To minimize the danger and risk a wall collapse after we lowered the floor, I poured a small steel reinforced curb wall in sections around the perimeter of the basement to hold back all of the exposed soil below the foundation stones.