Foundations
After you clear away everything you need to let go of, where do you start?
With the foundations, of course. This time I’m talking concrete, not the theoretical architectural mumbo jumbo behind it.
How can an 80 year old house stand the very strict structural stability regulations was a debate for quite some time. Ideal situation would be to sustain the structural authenticity and preserve the building material compounds while guaranteeing the construction won’t collapse even in case of an earthquake.
One solution would be to make a solid box connecting everything from foundations to the roof of the house making the whole structure very stable. The extreme interventions in our case would involve concrete foundations underneath the whole perimeter (= digging up segment after segment underneath the stone walls making sure they don’t collapse while we fill the holes with concrete), putting a steel wire on the insides of the walls connecting them with concrete sprayed over the entire surface and a concrete structure for the roof. Besides covering up the beautiful stone walls these interventions would mean turning the whole house into a rugged Faraday cage.
I was trying to go in the direction of using as little cement/concrete as possible, so we tried to go in the other extreme where barely any interventions would be needed. In the end we settled on this version: most of the house sits on solid rock so we’ll just fill in the holes with concrete in the foundations underneath the wall removing the earth where it’s visible. Walls will expose the stone on the inside as well as the outside of the walls while filling entire walls with lime mortar (no cement!) to stabilize them. The concrete crown sitting on top of the wall will support the wood structure for the roof.
The structural engineer could justify the interventions for the building permit as reconstruction work and I was happy with the following compromise: we keep the beautiful walls but I comply with the risk that everything goes down with the next earthquake. Beauty always comes with a price 🙂
As it turned out, almost all the walls are sitting on rocks. There were a few patches of earth underneath some parts of the wall so we excavated the earth and filled the holes up with concrete.
The corner on the south east end of the house demanded the most attention. Excavating earth, making the wooden frame and filling it up with concrete should do the trick of stabilizing the walls.
After 2 years of planning and struggling to get the paperwork sorted out, I am still amazed how fast things started happening on the building site. The foundations were ready before we knew it. It’s a good feeling knowing that the house is sitting on something solid.
I did get a comment about the sunny weather lurking from the photos. The pictures were in fact taken a while ago but since I didn’t have the time to write about our progress then, I’m trying to catch up with it now. But getting back to the intensity of the blue on the pictures – you’re right, it cannot be that perfect. It’s all photoshop 😉