Almost Skirted and Faulty Footers

The framing for the lattice skirts on the deck are built and fitted in place - now just need paint and lattice installed. Also finished the bead board on the stairs and added some additional trim work.

To fit the skirts, it was finally time to remove all the stucco off the brick footers supporting the rear section of the house. Needless to say the bricks were literally falling out of the stack. Fortunately my buddy John mortared them up to last another 100 years and a bit of finish pointing to boot. Here's a before and after of the north corner with loose bricks removed and after repairs....

yikes!.... and this is with top loose bricks still in place

this may actually support something now

By the way - that was the good side! The brick footers sit on leftover stone from the main house construction - how deep is any one's guess. But amazingly the rear has not really settled despite the condition of these corner footers. The two in the middle (4 total for the addition) are fine and the stucco still intact, probably helping keep them together. Under the stucco is cinder block that replaced old bead board between the footers. The areas not covered up by the deck will be replaced as original with bead board, the rest can stay just the way it is.

the master at work... just about every brick on this footer was loose

not bad for an "electrician" - thank again John!

And here is the same spot in 1945 with Norris's grandson Russ whom I met when the family came to visit. This is when this area was still an open corner porch entrance. You can also see the bead board that originally covered the crawl space before the stucco covered cinderblock. The upper bricks look loose even then too!