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This is the back of our house. The door you see went out from our kitchen to a room that is no longer there! The inside of that room is the picture you see on the previous page,... where the rotted wood is caving in! The window on the far right (closest to you) is the first window in our chapel. The bottom of that wall, where it meets the foundation, is where we found much of the water damaged, rotted sil plate.
This view is a close-up of the sil plate (below and to the right of the chapel window in the picture above). What's a sil plate, you ask? A sil plate is a board on top of the footing (the poured cement base around the house) that the floor, and then the walls, are built upon. Like Peter, it's the "rock" that our chapel was built on.... but it's NOT THERE! Just how it has 'floated' there all this time is truely miraculous. Note: our chapel organ also sits against the wall at this very spot!
This view shows the corner of the chapel and the back of the roof. The dark areas along the lower side of the roof, on the left side of the photo, are the patches that were made over the years to cover the rotten roof decking. All that will be replaced when we re-roof the back of the house. Notice the shingles stacked on the peak of the roof... We're getting ready! Now if we can just get some dry weather... Thank you Lord!
This is the side wall of the house. The window there is the one behind the altar in our chapel. Although you can't see it in this picture, the mountain behind us slopes down to this wall and there are huge boulders in the ground (at lower left) on the side of the house which need to be jack-hammered out. Only then can we divert and drain the water run-off from the mountain around and past the house.
A close-up of the same wall as above, but from the opposite angle. This wall has settled over three inches at the corner to your left, and sags in the middle over an inch and a half lower than the two outside ends of this wall! That's almost a six inch sag over all. In the left corner of this photo, again not a good picture of it, is the enormous boulder we have been working on for days now with the jackhammer.
Finally, the boulder! Not much room to walk here yet, but it does look much better now. This rock is so big it tipped the backhoe up onto two wheels! It's so hard, we can only take little pieces off at a time, in layers,with the jackhammer. We hadn't started yet in this picture, but after four days we've now reached the base of the footing so we're not far off. It's just long, hard work that takes patience,... lots of it!
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