What was that?

I spend a lot of time in my basement. Sara prefers the living room, go figure. The basement is the Rosetta stone for this house. Its a means of understanding who lived here, what they did, planned, removed, changed and so on. So far I have gathered that the previous owners were cheap, ambitious and not very handy.

The basement has dozens and dozens of peculiarities that I'm working on but one of them is this:



Look carefully and you can see that whatever sat in that concrete had a circular base. It was probably an old furnace. So far we've figured out a couple of things. First, they brought concrete through the basement window (to the right in the picture) at some point. We know this because they made a mess over the waste pipe and wall. Then we're pretty sure they had some extra left over and they just dumped it on the floor. There is clearly a second pour over the existing slab. The pour is of poor quality (a poor pour?) because you can pop it off pretty easily. For some reason this concrete was mounded up around the furnace which then was sitting on bricks (that are now lodged in the concrete).

its an annoying mound of concrete and one goal I have is to work at it from multiple sides and see if I can get at the original slab underneath. But I do want to be careful as I don't know what I'll find under it. So as I said, I'll work from the sides and see what I find.