I shoveled snow in the winter, dug out crawlspaces in houses to make a bigger basement and for the most part, I was just waiting for the Internet to be invented.
My uncle bought a beach cottage that was on a property that was adjacent to his beach house. He pretty much gave it to "the cousins", including his sons to be a hangout place for us. He gave them his credit card and told us we could fix it up if we wanted to.
One of the things that we discovered was that the house was pretty much propped up logs on sand. I don't mean that there were buried posts. There were literally logs just wedged in between the sand and the floor joists. That thing was one good storm away from becoming driftwood.
Because we were young and stupid, we decided to put a foundation under it. So we built a frame that supported the house from under the rafters and dug underneath it to make about a 4 foot crawlspace. We then made the forms for the foundation in the walls and did concrete pours to create kind of a half basement. I actually think it was done relatively well. For example, we knew enough to use forms and rebar, and I do know the house remains standing today, but as I think back on it, hanging a house from the rafters, which conveniently extended outside the wall line, and crawling underneath it and digging out, sand, was incredibly risky.
For what it's worth after we did that we also fixed up the interior. Since it was my uncle's house, his son got first choice as to rooms. When they got round to me, the only thing left was the uninsulated attic space which had to be accessed via a ladder. Not even Besler stairs. I painted it all white, put in two windows and a French door and build a small deck over an existing porch. It was actually pretty nice. My cousin's surprised me by putting in an actual staircase to access it. We bought furniture for it, and the rest of the house using my uncle's credit card. I loved it, because when you woke up, all you would see is ocean out the front windows.
At this point, the credit card bills must've come in, because my uncle wanted to see what the heck we were doing in the house. He toured the whole thing silently and when he got to the new staircase, he asked "what's this" and everybody said "CL's room". He went upstairs, looked around, handed me the keys to his beach house and said you boys will use this now. I remember feeling pretty proud that he thought we did such a good job that he preferred to live there. It made sense because there were a lot of us, and especially when friends came down, the original house was bigger and could accommodate more people. On the other hand, my uncle got a beachfront retreat. Everybody won.
commonplace.org
