You stated that during excavating and restruction of the 3rd level there still was a piano standing in 2nd level. As at that level excavating was done too, was there still living possible at 2nd level? I mean, there not only was digging done, but there needed to be access and debris must have been carried away through that 2nd level to. Or did you make a passway for that?
We lived in the house and used the second level the whole time. All of the materials and the crew entered the house through the crawl space of what became the third level. That meant that they had to carry materials down 40 outdoor steps, go through a work door and then carry materials back up to the crawl space of the second level. As mentioned in the article one of beams they carried down was 24' long and weighed 826 pounds.
The way my house was originally built there's a wide and short driveway in the front of the house that leads to a large attached garage in front. Under the garage is a crawl space. The second living level of the house didn't start until past the garage. In the enclosed photo I am under the garage and am measuring from the wall of the second floor living space to some giant footings, covered in black plastic, that hold up the garage. This is where the print room ended up but there were issues to overcome. The first was the slope of the hill and the location of the footings, as shown by the posts on the right, was a problem. By code you have to have at least a 45 degree slope of land leading up to the footing. The location I needed for the wall was 10'4" from the existing wall of the second floor living level. But there was not enough clearance because a room with an 8 foot ceiling means there's about a foot of floor and joists below it, so I needed 9 feet of clearance between the slope and the ceiling. But that meant that the hill was in the way, I would have to violate the 45 degree code which I was not going to do so I had to come up with a solution.
That solution was to suspend the long row of flat files over the slope thereby clearing the hillside. So in the print room the width of the actual floor space is only about 6 1/2 feet, but from wall to wall it's 10 feet, a 3 foot deep shelf making up the difference. Here's the photoshop design I did for suspending that shelf over the slope. The engineers thought the threaded rods that further supported the shelf was overkill given how strong the bracing was.
