Uncovering a HIDDEN Staircase!

[Music] thank you the water's cleared up quite a lot there's still a heavy stream of water coming through still need to patch those leaks and get a pipe to pump the water down to the Garden but another day foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] quite a bit lately you can see why we have to go through all of this effort to dig out the floor but you really see it on the walls so these walls are much darker and the waters kind of seeps up from the ground soaks the walls and then comes out to the point it's a little dark over here to the point that we actually have a little indoor spring going on here so I might not be a building expert but I'm pretty sure that you're not supposed to have a a small pond in your house so in this spot right here this is the the mountain it's not a stone that they place and the the water just seeps out of the mountain after really heavy rains which that's why we're going through all of this work that's why we're digging down putting in a vispaya or that air crawl space because all of this area will drain down underneath the floor and then have enough air circulation to dry out all of the water [Music] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] there is no time to waste find a space [Music] [Music] driving steady foreign [Music] [Music] it's amazing how many rocks we accumulate digging down some of these Stones came from just digging and finding rocks in the dirt some of them came from the walls that we had to tear stones out and underpin but our rock pile keeps getting larger and larger [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] so this is rather interesting but based on the number of stones it's very obvious that this doorway wasn't always here um it really seems to me like this was added later on because the the foundation extends over top of this Archway in a way that is not done in any other doorway opening in the rest of the house uh which makes it tricky because these stones are resting directly on large stones that protrude out this far into the room that's not exactly what I expected to find um I'll do some more Excavating but it likely means that just like in the other areas like see this large Stone I don't know if you can see that in the camera is protruding way out into the room and we need it to be flush down another 60 centimeters so that means we have a lot of slow underpinning work to do through this archway oh foreign [Applause] so this right here is exactly why you don't want to be digging out small areas like this with an excavator it has to be done by hand even though we can fit an excavator through the door a very small one man that bucket would grab a hold of one of these Stones thinking it's just dirt and then with a flip of a a wrist you're gonna pick this right up and compromise this entire structure so it's slow going but it just has to be done by hand this entire end of the wall is resting on a single Stone and unfortunately I need to either cut it back which is fairly precarious or remove it and replace it with other stones or concrete but the same is going on over here a single Stone is holding up this whole column but for today I'm not going to remove these guys quite yet I want to think about it for a while while we do need to remove them to do the the crawl space as well as running pipes and all of that sometimes doing things perfectly the cost of doing things perfectly rather is too high [Music] foreign so it's been raining non-stop for two weeks now so we've all kind of been cooped up with the kids at school when they get home it's pouring rain we don't take them over to the stone house because it's just it's wet and it's wet and it's a mess so our tiny little apartment is not very good for a family with uh to energetic children so we've been all cooped up today we've finally come out I think there's a small two-hour break in the rain and it's good just to I guess get out of the house see the view again and remember why we're going through all of this work but Lessons Learned rain or shine we got to get out of that apartment yeah this month we're going to do alien encounters okay so what this looks so cool so you guys know that we love little passports every month the girls get to open a really fun and educational box full of things to supplement their education this month actually they are doing an alien encounters version where they get to build a bioluminescent volcano among some other crafts that they get to do as well and they are so excited they love science so this is a really really fun experience for them so the great thing about little passports is that when you sign up for a subscription you can actually pick which subject you think would be the best for your child they have a wide range of things to choose from from cooking to science to traveling around the world there's something for everyone so if you'd like to sign up for little passports please check out the link in our description below and use our coupon code to get the best deal available and thank you so much to little passports for sponsoring today's video oh we have one really big problem to solve we have mentioned it before but it's getting quite a lot worse this wall here I know it's dark look how wet it is oh my goodness like it's hard to see it's like dripping other than can you see that oh it's a muddy yeah can you see it glistening that is so wet it seems like we are kind of going above and beyond what needs to be done by digging things out in order to insulate so that we don't have a moisture problem but as you can see it's absolutely necessary moisture problem I think it's pretty obvious the proper way to get rid of this amount of moisture is to dig behind the house and prevent it from ever penetrating through however we're not quite sure that's possible we've talked to an engineer who really doesn't think it's feasible it's definitely feasible in about half of the house but specifically this portion of the house it doesn't quite feel feasible to accomplish so we are essentially going to be building a brand new wall that acts as an exterior wall so this will not be the exterior wall it'll the water will come in and not be able to push further will drip down and underneath the crawl space to dry out that's the current plant but the more I see all of this water the more I wish we could dig behind the house so this is the amount of area we have behind the house and we would need to dig down about what is it Brady 12 feet 13 maybe even 14 feet so this wall would definitely be compromised if we were to dig down so far and there's not a lot of space in here to like really do it safely um the other side there's just a little bit more space I think that it's possible but here the engineer that we had come over and inspect this he looked at it and he said immediately mission impossible so we have to find some other way of doing it I have talked to one person who says it is possible and you had some ideas but it would be a very lengthy and complicated and expensive process [Music] this is the uh the very bottom of the property here and some of these stone walls are stacked probably the most beautiful on the entire property [Music] so the whole way down as I walked there are Stone staircases leading down but the further down the property you get the more degraded those Stone staircases are to the point that you get to this last one and it's completely covered up in dirt and Vines and is only barely visible it's been hidden by time and I'd really love to take a break from the the house and kind of uncover it and see how Grand it is because it looks like a pretty grand staircase I just can't see it foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] dude [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] so the problem here is we have probably a hundred years of Leafs decayed into what has to be at least half a meter of soil and roots and decaying leaves it's good quality soil but it's just uh covering up a beautiful stone staircase [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] it's crazy to think that just a couple hours ago all of these steps were fully buried by dirt there is just a few Stones sticking out that made me wonder if there was actually a staircase and I shouldn't be surprised but you would think that they would use small stones down here just because it's at the edge of the property but no these stones are solid the craftsmanship of this property just never ceases to amaze me it's crazy so as a reminder for anybody who is new here the property sits on a fairly steep slope and then these Terraces have been terraced out probably seven eight hundred years ago we don't really know but they would have carved into the mountain to flatten Out The Terraces as much as possible then use the stones that they would have found to build up the retaining walls but over the last six seven eight hundred years however long it's been the the mountain is starting to reclaim itself the the dirt washes down and covers things up that's why the the stone staircase was covered in very thick dirt and it just makes me wonder like how many other features like that that we aren't even aware of that are hidden that will be discovered kind of throughout the years that we are restoring this process gets me excited [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Raising Voyagers

Views: 1,026,054

Keywords: Raising Voyagers, Homestead, Renovation, Renovating a stone house, stone cabin, stone house, italy, Italian stone house, stone cabin in the mountains, mountains, alps, italian alps, history

Id: 0YSjqkhG_Ho

Length: 25min 57sec (1557 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023