Deck Excavation Begins

In the spirit of recent posts chronicling some of our early days reimagining and revitalizing Rosslyn, I take you back to January 3, 2007. These were the early months of our ultra ambitious historic rehab journey, and there were concurrently multiple projects happening at once. Similar to this December/January, we were experiencing unusually temperate weather, and we were able to hurtle headlong into challenges like the swampy zone between the abbreviated ell and the stonewall below the driveway. Turning the perspective a little, today’s photo essay documents the day, exactly eighteen years ago, that Rosslyn’s deck excavation begins.

In the photograph above, as well as all of the others in today’s post, Rick Stevenson (skid steer loader) and Robb Huestis (excavator) began digging, exploring, sorting, and removing the mysterious contents lurking beneath the moss, grass, and weeds.

Why, you ask, was this soggy median a mysterious wasteland in need of remediation?

A large portion of the rear ell (wing) was removed half a century ago. In fact the rear ell has undergone four or five, maybe even six significant rebuilds and alterations since the 1820s. (Source: Demolition: Rosslyn Dedux)

In fact, by my estimate, roughly 2/3 of the Rosslyn’s ell (the rear/west addition) that was present during Sherwood Inn days was demolished some time in the 1960s. (I’ve still never been able to identify exactly when the western most portion of the building was removed.)

And when a significant portion of this addition was demolished, much of the debris was simply backfilled into the foundation hole, topped with soil, and planted with grass.

But remember that the original building was constructed of brick with limestone foundation. And remember, too, as I explained in previous posts about the cisterns, that at least two subterranean, terra-cotta tile pipelines gravity-fed the basement cisterns from an uphill source, or more likely a system of uphill sources.

Sooo, I hypothesized that this landfill (yes, technically a former foundation now filled with demolition debris, but for all practical purposes “a landfill”) needed to be excavated in order to:

• troubleshoot why some areas were hyper saturated and other areas were subsiding (ie. “sinkholes”),
• determine and redirect the source of incoming water,
• create a new footer grade for new foundation, new footer drain, new perimeter drain, etc.,
• clean the site of any potentially undesirable debris that might adversely effect the conditions of our living environment as well as anything that we wouldn’t want to ultimately leach into Lake Champlain, and
• salvage locally quarried limestone from old cisterns and foundation to repurpose from landscape terracing and stone walls.

As you can see these photographs, we unearthed lots of limestone and even more brick.

The old building, partially abandoned and largely abbreviated, was handing us hurdles, one after the other, challenging our assumptions and our plans at every turn. But Rosslyn had begun rewarding us with hidden treasures.

Each bucketful of debris had to be sorted, filtering the reusable stone from the bricks, soil, and miscellaneous refuse. The photograph of Rick Stevenson and Robb Huestis standing on stones in the loader bucket looks like they’re performing some sort of lighthearted jig. In truth they were hand sorting yet another load of stone.

The heavy equipment belies the difficulty of separating usable from unusable. A slow tedious process only just beginning on this day all those years ago. Soon the site would be covered with hundreds of stones, sorted by condition and dimensions. And a massive pile of soil and debris.

All these years later, thank you, Rick and Robb. Your patience and perseverance accrued toward immense rewards — handsome stone walls, dating back to the origins of the historic buildings, that unify and define the property’s grounds — that will endure through the coming centuries. Bravo!