Cracks and whatnot

I thought I should get a better shot of the crack that started it all. It's kind of hard to see in the first pictures, so here's one with the big bastard front and center - with a yardstick for comparison.



"Gee golly, I don't know how ANYTHING got through that!"

To be fair, the war department did spend a little time chipping out the cement from the previous repair job (conservative estimate: 30 years ago), but that's still a pretty big crack.

Here's a shot of the basement in its current state:



That's from the bottom of the stairs, and shows the general working environment, as well as the fortifications we had to erect in order to keep the damn cat from stepping in the (corrosive) crack sealer we used to fill in the hairline crack in the slab. Pretty tidy, eh?

Not so our poor overloaded workbench:



More later, hopefully showing more progress. Not that the effort we'll be expending to clean the walls will show up very well on film.... sigh.