The Porch....What were they thinking???

The Porch....and all that concrete!

Just in case you thought we had given up, we have been waiting for the guys schedules to open up to start on the demo for the porch. The McShane house has this giant concrete porch on the front that wraps around three sides. It is a huge amount of concrete!

This is the front ( you can see the 3 windows)

North side on the porch...

This is one set of stairs...the other is on the north corner.



Well we started the demolition of this porch, I think it was added around 1950. Im not sure why they added it. It doesn't really go with the style of the house. After the porch was added it caused water to leak in and the foundation to fall. 
But anyway, the demo of the porch is ending up to be very interesting.

Here we go..... Taking out those overgrown bushes made a huge difference! They wont be back!

View From the driveway

From the Front

You can see here the progress here. The porch wall is about 18" tall.

North side of the house

From the front of the house

The wall is gone....(north side of house)

So this next picture is about where they ended for day one! I talked to the workers and got some interesting info. The stairs were solid concrete....I asked "is that normal?", and with a sly smile the worker said "no ma'am". He said it took them about 3 1/2 to  4 hours just to jack hammer the stairs out!  Plus, he said the stairs had some whole river rocks IN the concrete! I have no idea if this was usual for back then but the workers found it unusual for sure!

The stairs used to be there.


Here we are at day 2! 

Front of house....

This is the south side of the porch, second set of stairs are gone


This is where it gets a little interesting. This picture below shows the jackhammer at work, notice the thickness of the concrete. Most of the porch was about 8" thick. In this picture below.... the concrete is about 12"-14" thick. The guys were having a hard time moving it to the dumpster. CRAZY!

Huge chunk of concrete!

South side of house.


On a side note... We found this old medicine bottle in the dirt under the concrete. I can not believe the jack hammers did not break it. To bad the label is gone and the stopper was missing too!!! We have also found a ton of marbles! We can only assume kids have been rolling marbles in that front room for decades.

Things should start moving along now. We are finished with the move and we can concentrate on just one house.....not three! Phew! See ya soon