A mere week ago, Marc and I finished removing the siding from our basement. With the siding gone, the house looked a little... well, a little precarious. Like a cartoon chicken, standing on cartoon chicken legs.

(Which Marc does not look like, despite being at the center of this photo.)

Much to our relief, our contractor arrived two days later. Within a few hours, he and his two employees had busted up most of the basement slab, hand-dug several holes, and built Jenga towers to hold up the house.

Then the three guys painstakingly maneuvered steel beams around the telephone pole, fire hydrant, porch railings, internet cable, and electric lines, sliding them into the basement and onto the Jenga towers.

If you haven't been following this project, maybe you're wondering why we needed to replace the foundation. The answer is that the basement walls were becoming crumbly and the soil outside was pushing them in. I didn't quite understand how that had happened until these guys demolished part of a wall and I got to see the foundation material up close. This is it! This is what our house sat on for almost a hundred years! Yipes.

Each day has brought more Jenga towers ("cribbing," for the enthusiasts out there). Now the basement is so full of towers you can barely walk in it.

Next: Our contractor hopes to lift the house this Wednesday. Will windows break? Will floors sag? Will plaster crack? What will the house look like suspended a foot above the ground?