Our last post detailed the gorgeous front porch foundation, and now we're pleased to report that we've got some floor joists in place!

The floor joist installation raised a curious issue. This is definitely our first historic restoration rodeo, but instinct and common sense suggest this latest development is hardly unexpected. The masons did beautiful work on our new front elevation foundation. As professional craftsmen, they built a level brick wall. Guess what?! Norris House as a whole is decidedly NOT level. It slopes rather significantly downward when the eye travels from left to right across the front - to the tune of a couple of inches.

The new bays on the front elevation will include hardwood flooring that continues from the front rooms of Norris House. Those floors - you guessed it - slope downward slightly from left to right. This clearly causes some issues when the new floor joists sitting atop a beautifully plumb masonry foundation are also plumb straight.

The solution? Our framers are diligently planing the new floor joists to match the slope of Norris House's original structure. Charm and character for the win!

There are some pretty big developments at Norris House - the front porch restoration is picking up some serious steam!

You may recall that we previously unearthed the original front porch foundations during excavation work on site that looked a lot like a mini-archaeology dig. While our architectural renderings already contemplated replacing the 1930s front elevation with the original Victorian structure, those plans were drawn based upon the old Sanborn Fire Insurance maps that historic research unearthed. Finding the actual foundations was a boon, and we were able to document the exact dimensions of the original foundation for our restoration.

There were a few hiccups, and of course they were structural. The replacement of the support beam that sits atop the foundation and spans the entire front of the house was accomplished, but not without serious deflection of the front foundation wall beneath it. That's right - we literally had the front basement wall fall in. Clearly, that all had to be reworked. Now we have an unexpected, brand new basement wall running across the entire front of the house!

Then we set about gently removing and rebuilding the foundation running under the front bays and front porch. This task was complicated a bit by the late 18th century wall found during the dig, but we were able to work around that as well. Our Sigmon team took great care to identify the original bricks from the 1879 foundation that were in good condition, and work them in along with new bricks for the foundation. The new bricks selected are hand formed bricks, just like the old ones.

The results are beautiful, and we're hoping that our conditions from the National Park Service will allow them to remain unpainted so all the beauty can show through.

Things Aren't Quite Straight Up Front

Forward Progress: The Front Porch Appears