Post 23: Work High and Low

View from the second floor with light from the setting sun. Photo credit: Ryan Crowell

This week, as the carpenters built a second floor deck on the new ell, Nils and I muddied our boots in the old basement salvaging more of the antique bricks. Historical records tell us that the crumbly, irregular multi-colored bricks were hand made back in the early 1800s at a factory in nearby Lovell.

Old basement brick piers

Scaper and mason’s hammer

We used hammers to knock down the three brick piers that used to support the heavy granite chimney stack. This job was made harder by the skim of cement added to the piers in the 1970s to reinforce them. But once the outer layer was broken, it was easy to pull out whole bricks from the interior courses and knock off the soft sticky clay mortar. We used a scraper and our own gloved hands to clean them and a brick tong to carry them, in batches of eight, to a waiting pallet.

Nils uses a mason’s tool called a brick tong to carry cleaned salvaged antique bricks.

It was a dirty job made dirtier when I tried to turn off a couple of pipes that were leaking water from the old well. The old valves failed and started gushing water onto the frozen floor of the basement, making a slurry as it mixed with the discarded clay mortar. As the water began to rise, we ran for shovels and other tools to create a little river, coaxing the water toward the old sump pump hole in the granite floor. Happily, we have a plumber on our construction team. Ryan called Adam who came to the rescue with new valves that shut off the water. The volume of water gives us hope that we can reuse our well and pipe it to the Red House in its new location.

The view from up the hill. Photo credit: Pam Bastille

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