Foundations

I'm having weekly meetings with the general contractor for the house and in addition to the necessary oversight, I'm finding it a convenient time to snap a few pictures and update the blog.  If you have been enjoying the blog so far, you might want to comeback more frequently (weekly) now.  You can also add your e-mail address in the 'subscribe' box on the right to get updates via e-mail.

The foundations have started going in.  Of course, since we are just doing extensive remodeling of an existing house there is not a huge amount of foundation work to do.  There will be a new structural wall, and some things like that.

Traditionally, the beams supporting the floors were built into the walls, however it's much easier and stronger (more fire resistant) to use a metal subframe now, so the steal workers were in bolting/welding the subframe to the walls.

There still demolition work going on too.  The roof is slowly coming down which is a delicate process, made a little easier with the crane.

We had hopped to use some of the wood from the roof in the new construction, but the condition is too bad.  It's a shame, but the climate in Porto (warm, sometimes humid with wet, temperate winters) is perfect for rotting wood.  Fungus (dry root) damage is common, and insect damage is endemic to old house such as ours.  Woodworm (which is actually a beetle) loves Porto.  When we were looking for a location for Terraplana, we saw many houses, and they all had some degree of wood that looked like this:

The tiny holes are exit holes for the adult beetles.  They do not eat wood as adults, but they lay their eggs in the cracks of the wood and the larva feed there.  The only defense is prevention.  The prevalence of wood damage is one of the reasons we chose a relatively small house for Terraplana.  Every house we saw would require a ground up rebuild of the wood structure, so the only choice for us was to take on a smaller house.