Remember that big
pile of concrete we had in our basement? Meredith and her niece helped me move it out of the basement and into a bin. I then broke up the rest of the floor and carried it out into the bin.
Our house has double brick walls, so the walls of the basement and first floor are two bricks wide. The footing consists of two rows of bricks, with the top row being four bricks wide and the bottom row being six bricks wide. After removing the concrete floor, we discovered that the footing was completely missing in one area. It appears that these bricks were removed when the drains under the front yard were replaced (not by us!), but luckily the area was small and it did not affect the overlying bricks at all. I fixed this little problem by pouring concrete to replace the bottom row of bricks, and replacing the missing bricks on the top row of the footing. Problem solved.
I do not have any photos of the most grueling part of the entire project. The concrete floor that we removed was 2" thick, and the new floor is 7" thick (4" of gravel, 3" of concrete), so we needed to remove about 8" of soil from the entire basement just to gain about 2" of ceiling height. This required digging the dirt into buckets, carrying the buckets up the stairs, and pouring the dirt into a dumpster. That does not sound like a big deal, but those buckets get heavy after a while (a good contractor would likely use a conveyor system), and we had to remove roughly 10 cubic yards of dirt from the basement. I was extremely exhausted after finishing about half of the basement, so my brother came down for a couple of days to help and we finally got it done.
Our house has double brick walls, so the walls of the basement and first floor are two bricks wide. The footing consists of two rows of bricks, with the top row being four bricks wide and the bottom row being six bricks wide. After removing the concrete floor, we discovered that the footing was completely missing in one area. It appears that these bricks were removed when the drains under the front yard were replaced (not by us!), but luckily the area was small and it did not affect the overlying bricks at all. I fixed this little problem by pouring concrete to replace the bottom row of bricks, and replacing the missing bricks on the top row of the footing. Problem solved.
I do not have any photos of the most grueling part of the entire project. The concrete floor that we removed was 2" thick, and the new floor is 7" thick (4" of gravel, 3" of concrete), so we needed to remove about 8" of soil from the entire basement just to gain about 2" of ceiling height. This required digging the dirt into buckets, carrying the buckets up the stairs, and pouring the dirt into a dumpster. That does not sound like a big deal, but those buckets get heavy after a while (a good contractor would likely use a conveyor system), and we had to remove roughly 10 cubic yards of dirt from the basement. I was extremely exhausted after finishing about half of the basement, so my brother came down for a couple of days to help and we finally got it done.
