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Sarah is almost done with her semester of school which means she’ll be on break for a bit and we can try and get some work done. We were trying to get an inch of spray foam in the first floor, but the more I look at it the less feasible that seems right now.

We have one of the many order of operations problems. We need a dumpster to clear out the rest of the piles on the first floor, but we don’t want to get it until we demo the foyer. We don’t want to demo the foyer until we get our permits, and who knows how long that will be.

The other thing we can work on, which should really be done before we get another dumpster, is finally replace the beam in the basement. I’ve been slowly working toward that goal for the last year, but I’ve been putting it off due to cost, time, and the non-trivial apprehension about the project.

So with a five week window and the holidays mixed in, I’m cleaning out the basement and putting together the plans, starting with digging new footings and building a temporary support wall.

Today I swept up the debris that’s been raining through the floor boards from the first floor, moved the lumber and scrap metal piles to the outside wall, and picked up the mess of tools and junk that had accumulated over the course of several other projects.

We ordered a laser level and a distance measurer. When they arrive in a few days we’ll do some measuring, get the steel beam and columns ordered, and start work on the footings.