08/19/2026
She can breathe again.
For years, Isabelle carried a six-foot hole in her roof and leaks nobody chased down. The water had nowhere to go. And she’d lost the ability to manage moisture the way she was built to years before that. Because the water had nowhere to go, her foundation heaved up in the middle. Once we closed the roof and opened her sealed cellar windows, the ground around her could finally dry out, and she started settling back into place.
Through all of it, her windows never went out of square. Let that sink in. 143 years old, half-drowned, still square.
Here's what nobody tells you about houses like this: in 1883, "dry basement" wasn't a thing. No poured concrete, no v***r barriers, no sump pumps. These houses were built to breathe—permeable walls, dirt floors, cellar windows for airflow. A damp cellar wasn't a flaw. It was a root cellar doing its job.
So when someone later sealed her cellar windows and packed her stone foundation in Portland cement, they didn't dry her out. They shut down the only systems she had for managing moisture. Cement doesn't breathe, so the moisture that used to ev***rate safely through the joints gets forced into the stone instead. Every winter, that trapped water freezes inside the limestone and expands. The ice pushes outward against the stone from the inside, and a piece of the face cracks off. It's called spalling, and it happens one freeze-thaw cycle at a time—the same cycle, every winter, for as long as the cement stays on.
Each cycle only takes a small piece. But it repeats, year after year, and the losses compound. The stones get thinner and weaker at exactly the point where they're carrying the weight of the house above them. Left long enough, it stops being a cosmetic problem and becomes a structural one, the difference between repointing a foundation and rebuilding it. That's the window we're in right now, while it's still the former.
A huge thank-you to Walker Jenson—a Holton High School gentleman and friend of Cody’s —who spent part of his summer helping us chisel every inch of that cement off Isabelle’s 1883 foundation by hand. It was hot, slow, unglamorous work, and he showed up for it. We’re so grateful for his help getting her stone back to bare limestone.
The stretch behind the new porch is repointed now, in lime mortar this time, the way she was actually built. That's one section done. The rest of her foundation, all the way around, still needs it.
And while we were back there, we found something we weren't expecting: a cellar window on the south side, bricked over and buried under more of that same cement. Nobody knew it was there. More on that soon.
