The Thomas/Padgett Home

Under the log house the corners were originally on dry stacked rock, the corner footing rocks were below frost depth. During the 1865 remodel between these piers was filled with brick underpenning. The brick was set on flat rocks dug in below grade and was double thickness, alternating in a woven pattern. Much of this brick curtain wall had tipped over during the years and was buried around the edges of the house.

When we were excavating under the east end of the timber and brick section we had a suprise. The brick wall kept going down. I unstacked the double coursed brick to a depth about six feet below grade. As I worked toward each end of the trench I ran into a triple thickness brick exterior basement wall extending east into the present yard. This would have been under the farmhouse east wing. We had found the root cellar. It had been filled with brick from the chimney and foundation of the east wing when they tore it down around 1965. The length of the wall we excavated was about 19 feet, the depth of the cabin.

We decided not to excavate the cellar, but simply remove the old wall and replace it with a modern, wider, reinforced footing and masonry wall underneath the former timber framed wing.

We laid block up to just below grade on the root cellar side, it can be seen at the base of the new stone foundation. The footing was brought to within a foot of grade elsewhere and rock was laid directly on the footing. We salvaged an old chimney off some family property and used its rocks in the new foundation wall.
We decided that the timbers used in the old addition were too far gone to re-use. They were also not up to modern code size-wise. The brickwork that had been exposed since 1965 had wicked moisture into an already decaying frame, it had never been intended for the exterior. We decided this wing will house a small kitchen and bath in this remodel. Conventional framing was chosen to make this work smoothly. The new addition will be sided in weatherboard siding similar to that which was used on the existing upper gables, it can be seen in one of the pictures above. This is likely siding used in the 1865 remodel.

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