Inkassing
This is a Dutch word to describe what they are now doing on the foundation work. If I look up the word in an online dictionary, it says ‘recess’, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Anyone have a better translation?
Anyway, in the picture above, you can see they have made some holes in bottom of the wall, 50cm every 50cm to be exact. They will make these holes all the way around the house, and in each one put a jack like you see above. In this way, half the house will be supported by means of a jack.
In foundation repairs jacks are always used. This is because you somehow have to move the weight of the house from the old foundation to the new one, and jacks are always needed in some way. I think the way they will do it with my house is a little unusual however.
What will happen is they will pour a new concrete floor and entomb the jacks, as well as fill the spaces in the walls. The concrete floor will have a complex reinforcing structure, and will be supported by the piles that were driven earlier. The new foundation will then be in place, and capable of supporting the house.
Over time, the old foundation will continue to degrade and sink, and in this way the weight will gradually be taken up by the new foundation. The construction engineer mentioned he included in his calculations that the old foundation will continue to provide a degree of support for the house into the future.
Murky Depths
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about my house foundation, with all the excitement of the events in Brussels, I almost stopped paying attention. They’ve just gotten to the exciting part! They’re removing the contaminated ground under the house.
Since the house is built nearly at water level, they didn’t have to dig far before they reached water. In the picture above you can see they inserted a measuring stick so they could monitor the water level with respect to the dirt. Soon they are going to start running a pump to remove some of the water, so they can dig deeper. Rain is forecast, so the water table might start rising too.
You can see the pipes sticking out of the ground are what they drove for the piles. They aren’t yet filled with concrete, but that’s due to happen on Monday.
The smell is quite incredible. Oily and very dirty smelling. It’s classified by the city as very toxic waste (when compared to what they usually find under peoples houses in the city). Mostly it’s heavy metals that are the problem; high levels of zinc, a bit of lead and mercury, and some other things. The test showed traces of petroleum distillates. It’s very dirty!
According to city records, until 1930 or so the house had a dirt floor. What they found was 3 different concrete floors built on top of one another.
The house is 350 years old and and been sinking the whole time. Literally, from one generation to the next, they’ve just been dumping their crap into the floor, letting it sink and building a new floor on top.
Here you can see the former load bearing wall I posted about before. Now it’s a nice new steel beam.
Bricks!
They’ve made remarkable progress over the last few days. The wall is almost gone, just a few difficult spots left. They’ve also broken up half the floor.
Where the wall used to be are piles of bricks…
There’s an incredible diversity among the bricks.
Load Bearing Wall
It’s almost time to remove the load bearing wall in the middle of my house. For new readers, I’ve already made a series of posts about my foundation repair and here.
The piles have all been driven, and the city has inspected them and given approval. One pile went a little wrong, perhaps driven a little fast and too enthusiastically, but wasn’t deemed a serious problem. Still to be done on the piles are to fill the hollow pipes with concrete.
In the meantime however, the empty pipes of the piles are the most stable thing in the house, so they are building the support structures needed for the load bearing wall removal on top of the pipes. You can see on the bottom left of the picture below, a section of pipe sticking out of the floor.
The support structure above is built on 3 pile pipes, and is about a half meter off the floor. On the right side of the picture, you can see a hole in the wall. That part of the wall was in a particularly bad state, and basically fell apart as they were installing the support. In front of the hole, you can see the pile of bricks that came from the hole.
The picture below was pretty much taken of the same angle, but of the ceiling. You can see how the steel bars are supporting the ceiling. This same sort of support was built along both sides of the load bearing wall.
Below is the support structure built used along the outer walls.
It’s really been a big undertaking to build this support structure! It was built, then the contractor came along and decided it needed to be changed, then the construction engineer came along and decided it needed to be changed, then the contractor wanted to change it again.
Today the city came along to give their final approval to remove the wall. The good news is they gave their approval, but the bad news is the support structure needs to be changed again and strengthened! The city also wants a simple support installed on the front of the house.
It’s probably a little more interesting for the Europeans reading this, but the bricks in my house are very special. They are the original ones used to build my house 350 years ago, and they were all handmade. The guy doing the demolition work has been removing them one at a time, cleaning and stacking them.
The contractor tells me they are worth money! At a yard sale they apparently go for €2-3 a piece. I don’t know if I’ll pay back the cost of my foundation that way, but they are clearly an important part of the history of my house.
Featured Blogs on the RHS Site
I posted a picture of myself a few days ago, but didn’t say what it was for. It’s been published! You can find it here, on the UK Royal Horticultural Society website’s Grow Your Own pages, together with some other well known garden bloggers. You may have to click on the ‘more blogs’ link to find my picture. What a fun idea, posting pictures of all of us together!
Now we have to see how many people actually read this page, follow the link and how much traffic I’ll actually get…
It’s been interesting to see how the relationship between bloggers and organizations like the RHS or media organizations has matured over time. Of the two major media organizations in the UK, The Guardian has openly come out, embraced the world of blogs, regularly links to more well known blogs and in my opinion this makes the quality of what they offer much higher. The BBC on the other hand pretends blogs don’t exist. In the US it’s a similar story, with MSNBC linking to blogs sometimes, but most others like CNN ignoring the world of private blogs.
How can media organizations consider themselves legitimate, when they report on stories like the recent revolution in Egypt, identify blogs as a major part of this, then ignore and not link to them? If they’re a major part of the news, we should be able to read them, with translating tool if necessary, and for this a link needs to be provided! Finding the Egyptian blogs really took some searching. What about blogs in the rest of the Middle East? If they’re there, they shouldn’t be ignored.
Most news organization by now call their website a ‘blog’ or have a section of ‘blogs’, but they don’t have blogrolls, you have to register to leave a comment they don’t write about other blogs, they lack an informality in how they write or in some other way just don’t have one of the things most of us understand are important about a blog. It’s become an important split in the world’s mainstream media.
The RHS
Back to the RHS, one of the best known UK gardening charities. I’m pleased they’re reaching out to blogs, but at the same time there’s some dirty laundry to be aired.
While they have a very important history, in modern times they have not done a lot to promote agricultural biodiversity. If you go to their online seed shop, you’ll find a difficult to search through selection of commercial seeds, with a few heirloom and heirloom sounding varieties mixed in. Don’t buy seeds from their website, just because you see my picture there! They are not the right people to buy seeds from.
I had a similar experience when I visited Wisley Gardens a few years ago during apple season. I walked around in their apple orchards, with most of the apples rotting on the ground. Then I walked into their tasting area, sampled pieces of apples and cider that were brought in from somewhere else, and mostly completely different varieties from what they had in their fields. The same was true in the garden shop, which had commercial varieties of apple trees on sale but not many old varieties were visible or available. They’re a good place to go and look at the trees in the field, but if you’re interested in growing old apple varieties, you should get your trees somewhere else.
In the same way the RHS or The Guardian hope to increase their customer base by making relations with blogs, I hope it’s possible for blogs to sometimes criticize and influence the commercial nature of these organizations.
