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The "Stone Bridge"
When everything you do on a project just feels so wrong IT MUST BE RIGHT.
This project isn't done yet but I'm hopeful.
My friend Tim is stone fasciaing his house which got me to thinking - why not design and build a stone bridge over one of the water inlets to the pond.
I'm hopeful that this project will get me on Discovery Channel's "Extreme Engineering" show (keep a look out for me).
The plan is to build a bridge out of concrete block and then stone fascia it - aka put stone on the outside of the block to make it look like a stone bridge and not a concrete wonder. The picture you see above is a picture of the footer for the first column. "Say what?" A footer aims to keep the bridge column from sinking into the ground or tilting from
Pennsylvania's freezing and thawing cycles. The only problem is that my footer isn't a footer, it's more of a pad - it doesn't extended 30 inches down into the ground but instead only 10 inches.
Yep, it only goes down 10 inches into the ground. I figured when I was building the footer that I had two options: 1) Break my back from digging a hole down to China or 2) Dig a 10" hole, create a learning experience, and have time for some beers on the dock.
Be sure to visit the
How I built the Stone Bridge section.
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