For those of you who have spent any time with Martin, seeing a knife stuck into a wall is the norm. However, when Martin set up the laser level on the stone pier that had supported the carry beams which ran through the middle of an tigin (just like the other sills with nibbed scarf joints), he wanted to mark a spot so he could recalibrate the level to the same place each time we used it. Martin had a knife handy, but no pen, pencil, or marker, so the knife went into the wall and was our guide for several days of leveling.
Martin wants the ground under the house leveled. We will be doing a fair amount of work walking around on it, we need to dig along the outside walls to see how deep the pier supports go, and eventually we will be digging out the partial basement. (It looks like we will not be really raising the house, just supporting it while we put in better frost walls and we'll dig a partial basement instead of a full basement.)
Anyway the top layer of the dirt is 91 year old dead sod. The roots still hold it together fairly well and, believe it or not, made it difficult to dig. I was getting used to digging the sand, which is very easy to deal with. (For now, however, digging the basement in sand could be challenging since the walls will collapse in. Sand isn't known for holding its shape.) We also have lots of roots from the lilac bushes that were at the front and side of this particular corner.
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