The Main Lodge Floor Phase 1 - The Foundation

Remember the song Muffin Man, where kids progressively jump up and down singing "Do you know the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man….?”  Well, the 1933 original rock footings and pole supports finally settled enough so that the floor would flex about 3” when 250 scouts landed all at the same time.  It was time to put in real concrete footings, posts with metal brackets and span the big pit with some serious main beams and I-joists.  

But, this had to be a "phased in project" as you could only remove every other post, dig the footing, frame the footing, pour the concrete, jack up the floor and then cut the post to length, install and put in brackets.  We could only do ¼ of the floor at a time and each phase of digging, framing, pouring, cutting and leveling took a separate weekend.  Over 120 new footings were installed in a 3 year period and now the floor doesn’t budge and the Muffin Man is back in the program. 

This project is almost complete as we are adding some shear bracing on the corner shear walls that were installed in the 1960’s.  Another couple of weekends and this will be complete – except perhaps under the stage. We will have a page on the improvements in the near future so you can see the time and efforts this has taken.  

Special Thanks to Travis Vodden as he has been the driving force on this project.  We would not have been able to make this progress without 3 years of making progress.  

We put it off as long as we could as we knew that this would not be a fun project to work under that building.