Another milestone was reached today, we sealed up the opening for the old stairs into the basement. It was quite the undertaking. First, we had to pull up all the subfloor and partial joists. Then, we had to cut and notch new joists to take the place of the old joists. The following pictures show the before and after of the opening.

In the first picture, you can see the massive stacked stone foundation and the 8x8 beam that runs the length of the house.

In order to get the new joists into place, we had to clear out some of the stacked stone that had been placed between the old partial joists. Since these stone was very pretty, I decided to start making a small stacked stone border around the tree in the front yard.