Basement Hole

Since we will be moving a load-bearing wall in the kitchen, the support beam taking its place needs to sit on some posts. This required a deeper footing in the basement to take the load. We cut through the basement floor using a diamond blade in the circular saw. The post will land right next to the existing stairs so we had to remove part of the stairs in order to be able to cut under it, then brace it back together again. While doing this we discovered that someone had penciled labels on some of the treads - “Fisk” (the original architect in 1925).

The diamond blade in the circular saw worked pretty well but made the basement look like Mount St. Helens after the dust settled even though we used the shop vac to try to catch the clouds.

We also had to brace an existing post which happened to sit on the very square of concrete that needed removal. Surprisingly, the concrete was only a couple of inches thick, but that was fortunate in this case since the circular saw only has about 2.5-3 inches of usable cutting depth.