One side of the house was dug out yesterday afternoon. It's just starting to hit me, how much bigger the new foundation will be. The crawl space is being dug out, as well as the front porch, neither of which were part of the basement before. We'll need a couple of supporting walls under different parts of the house (it's 45 feet long), but as my dad said, "the walls won't be a foot thick!", which translates into a lot more space. The water heater and softener are being moved from the other end of the basement(!) to the same room as the boiler and well stuff. Hopefully that means we'll get hot water upstairs a lot sooner, because it used to have to travel a long way.
The old foundation contains a lot of limestone - big, thick chunks that have brought out the Farm Syndrome in Dad. Farm Syndrome, for those who don't know, is when, after being at the farm for a certain amount of time, a person develops an intense desire to Save Everything: wood, pipe, Cool-Whip containers, and yes, rocks. I have to admit that Mike, Dad, and I all have Farm Syndrome (FS), because saving the limestone sounded like a good idea to me. What a great patio! Or wall, or garden path, or...something! Of course, one of the side effects of FS is not recognizing all the work involved in collecting and storing everything until one comes up with a use for it. In this case, it mea
ns moving a lot of heavy rocks out of the construction zone and stacking them up someplace else. Hopefully all the work will be "worth it", although this phrase means nothing to someone with FS: saving something is Always Worth It, even if that odd bolt or jar of screws will only be useful to whoever lives on the farm 30 years from now. I can't count the number of times we've needed a specific, odd part and thought, "Y'know, before I run to the store, I'll take a look in one of these buildings", and found exactly what we needed. Of course, FS can only be successful if you have multiple storage buildings available, so I wouldn't recommend it for apartment dwellers.
Digging continues for the rest of the week. The house movers will have to come back out and move the "cribbing" (stacks of wood that hold up the house) so they can dig under them, but for now they're working around them. This is the part I can't watch, 'cuz seeing bulldozers that close to the only thing holding up my house makes me a leeeetle bit nervous.
The only thing left in the basement is the well pressure tank. Our neighbor gets his water from us, since it was all one property when his house was built. We didn't want him to go a month without water, but it's been a "challenge" to keep the water flowing. Our power company finally decided to show up and move our meter away from the house, but they didn't bother to tell anyone (they moved it on Tuesday; I got a letter in the mail today) and cut off the neighbor's water in the middle of a shower! Our electrician made a special trip to get the well pump back on, and I can't wait to see what THAT bill is. Now the excavator is working carefully around the 
water line and power line from the well. The guy in the photo's only job is to hold the power line out of the way so the digger can dig. The machine operator is some kind of digging guru, working around the water line (the grey hose by the "holder's" knees in the second photo), the power line, the pressure tank, the cribbing holding up the house, and his guy! This is the last corner to dig out -- all in three days, which is much faster than I tho't. Hooray! 
