A little more than two years ago now I posted about my house foundation. I wonder how many readers have been around that long and were paying enough attention to remember that post! What’s really funny is how the picture from this original post was indexed by Google. Have a look at the Google images search for House Foundation and see if you can find the picture of our foundation.
Anyway, it’s time. I’ve waited as long as I could, but the city says it has to be done now or the houses will collapse. I turned in the application for the building permit today, and it’s time to start the great paper chase before doing the actual work.
Ours are the two dark colored houses in the middle of this picture, with a straggly looking grape vine going up the middle. They are open on the inside and fully joined together, only the outside makes them look like two houses. The discerning eye may notice the orange glow of a growlamp in the upper right hand window where I have started my seedlings.
The two houses were built at the same time around 1680 when our neighborhood was built, making them 328 years old. Our neighborhood, the Jordaan, was the first major expansion of the city outside of the heavily fortified original center.
At the time the average person had 8m2 of living space or about 86 ft2! The city expansion was desperately needed. The houses were built during the peak years of the Dutch East Indies Trading Company, the money from which is almost certainly what funded the initial construction.
The houses were built on a wooden foundation, with 4 meter long piles. This wooden foundation was built entirely under the outside walls, no part of the foundation extended toward the middle of the house. Until the 1930s, the house had a dirt floor on the ground level.
The new foundation will be built with concrete piles made by driving hollow pipes into the ground and filling them with cement. These will be placed in the middle of the house on the ground floor and steel rods will be placed across the top of them extending into the walls and in turn stabilizing the structure.
The reason the foundation lasted this long was because as long as wood stays wet and isn’t exposed to air, it won’t rot. Our house was built at sea level, with the foundation below sea level. Because it was submerged, it never rotted.
All over The Netherlands, but in Amsterdam in particular, is the problem that where there is land protected and drained by canals and dikes, it sinks slowly over time. That’s whats been happening to our house which has sunk an average about 1mm for every year of it’s life. As you can imagine, things were starting to get out of hand after a while, not just with our house but the whole city. At some point in the course of managing the water and ground levels, around the 1950’s, the city made the decision to lower the water level to the point where most wooden house foundations were exposed to air, including ours.
All over the city now house foundations are rotting and being repaired.
Our new foundation will be built to around 14 meters where there is a stable ground layer, instead of the original 4 meters, meaning our house won’t sink anymore.
I don’t know if I can take a lot of pictures of what’s going on, but I will at least post from time to time about it.
In case you are wondering what a home repair like this costs, let me assure you just thinking about it is making my eyes water. The total costs aren’t known yet, but this looks set to be more money that I have ever spent in my life with the exception of the initial purchase of our house. There are some subsidies for this available from the city, but I have been warned not to expect too much.
Damn, that does not sound like a fun undertaking! It sounds really interesting, though. Good luck–I hope everything goes smoothly for you guys.
Ouch.
I read about those wooden foundations in an Amsterdam museum last year. It seemed a clever piece of old technology. They obviously didn’t bargain for the houses lasting so long. Hope all goes well.
Hi John,
The ground floor is still technically zoned as commercial space. I’ve talked with some people about opening a business there, and considered doing it myself. Most of the other houses on the street have businesses on the ground level.
Here are some old pictures:
http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/blogpics/010009005606.jpg
This picture is from July 1954, and on the left side there is a suitcase/bag store. On the right side is a ‘Sail Maker’, and while it looks like there might be some nautical related items in the window, when translating this from Dutch a ‘Zeil Maker’ could also be in reference to canvas awnings for windows.
http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/blogpics/10009A003744.jpg
This is a picture from April 1970, and this was a Radio and TV ‘Wholesale’ store according to the sign in the window. The idea of wholesale is kind of funny, because it’s a very small room. On the top of the windows are advertisements for caravans for sale or rent.
I understand there was also a ‘rock store’ there at one time, selling interesting rocks for collectors. I haven’t come across any other information of what was there before. I talked with the lady that lived in the house for many years starting at the end of WWII, and these were the only businesses she knew of.
Good luck! Was the ground floor ever used as a shop which may explain the large windows?
I’m going to follow your foundation troubles closely. I have some crackinh in the foundation of my house that will probably involve a five figure repair. Of course your house is three hundred years older than mine…
I can see why you love Amsterdam so much, it’s a beautiful house and the neighborhood looks very charming.
This is so interesting. Captain Cook didn’t even discover Australia until 1770 and already your house was nearly 100 years old! I love to read of this type of thing – we can learn so much about life around the world from real people like you. I love the Feedjit thing on my blog which shows all the places the blog hits come from and I realise that I don’t know any of those flags and have never heard of most of the cities!
You have my sympathy. Our house is a mere 118 years old and we were informed last week that ALL our rafters are cracked and must be replaced.
The true horror is that the rafters were probably cracked by the 1924 snow storm in my area that caved in the roof of an old theater killing dozens. My rafters show signs of ‘repair’ but my friend the engineer was sheet white when he descended the ladder. He still can’t believe the repairs have held.
So, I won’t be getting a new back deck or bathroom. Just some unglamorous rafters.
Thanks everyone for all the good wishes and kind words.
Kate:
I never stop thinking about this kind of thing. When was my hose built in relation to Columbus traveling to America, and so on.
After we bought the house I remember thinking to myself why are the ceilings so low? It seems really cramped sometimes.
A few years later I was at the Amsterdam Historical Museum. They had a pair of adult leather shoes from the time my house was built which were still intact, and they were tiny. They looked like shoes for a teenager. In another display they had some recreations of what people probably looked like and they too were small, maybe a little over a meter tall. That’s why my ceilings were built so low! Our modern diets really make us very big compared to our ancestors. For them the ceiling height would have been very normal.
When evaluating the construction permit, the city may force me to do an archaeological study before putting the new foundation in.
These kinds of things keep occurring to me, and I’m really learning a lot living here.
Tory:
That’s what really gets me! I’m going to spend all this money, suffer through all this construction, and in the end my house is going to look exactly the same! No new kitchen. No new windows. Not even a fresh coat of paint.
Best of luck with the rafters!
Fascinating history. Those shopfronts are a useful thing to have – you could open a garlic shop!