Friday - March 1, 2013
Ghon and I both took off work on
Friday to prepare as much as possible for the big demolition 'party' on
Saturday. After taking the kids to daycare, we headed out to Home Depot and
Lowes to purchase a few additional supplies, of which included a new mailbox.
The old mailbox’s door didn’t like staying closed, and as a result, last
weekend we found several pieces of our mail near the creek bed – and it was 2
months old. Not a good thing. That’s probably where the first phone bill that I
never saw is buried.
Ghon did the HD shopping while I
took a phone call for work. A quick trip to Lowes and we headed back to the house
where our friend Tim was going to meet up with us to give us a hand. I headed
back out into town to pick up the drinks we needed for Saturday. When I returned, Ghon had the new mailbox
post installed (but no mailbox installation) and was getting ready to work
inside.
The task of the day was to get as
much sistering of the floor joists complete. In the middle of the room, the
joist was cracked and completely separated. Here, three of us installed two new
beams. This basically acted as a new joist and the broken joists as the sister
beams. After securing this section, we hauled out a ton of drywall and lumber and
tried to neaten up a bit for the next day.
That evening, the kids helped pick
up some of their toys while we started food prep. Three pork shoulders went on
the smoker, macaroni and cheese and baked beans were prepared, and two BBQ
sauces made. I pulled the pork off the smoker about 1am before going to bed.
Saturday, March 02, 2013
The Jonathan alarm went off at 5;
and the Genevieve alarm when off – and never hit snooze – at 6am. Ghon rolled
out of bed and to the house about 7, while I got the kids ready and got our
sitter Aly oriented to the house and waited for her reinforcements. I baked a
coffee cake and started packing the truck.
Our friends Larry and Charlotte were the first to arrive, followed by
Charlie, Tim, Cassy, Clint, Kevin, Dave & Jen (to our live-in house where
Jen helped watch the kids), Travis, and last but not least, Kathryn and Cecil.
When I arrived everyone was busy working in multiple areas of the house.
Before everyone arrived, Ghon made
a video tour of the house. We’ll make video tour #2 tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll
post more pictures then. I'm having issues uploading the video to the blog, so bare with me.
The teamwork was amazing. Husband
and wife demoing closets and pulling carpet in the master bedroom, rough hewn
lumber being removed from the original logs in the living room and full on
demolition of the lower level bathroom – everywhere there was activity. A
mallet was swung to knock out a wall while I ripped carpet up off the stairs.
We cut a hole in the screen of the upper level porch to toss out carpet, sofa
cushions and just general trash – and someone below hauled and sorted to the
burn pile or dumpster. It was amazing.
For as much as we were able to
finish, we did lose about three hours of time when a big issue was discovered.
I had to make a trip to Lowes for
additional washers and bolts. When I left, there was work everywhere. When I
returned, I walked into the living room with everyone staring into a hole –
and saying “we found a body.” Well,
while they did not find a body, yet, they did produce a skull. Now, I am
petrified of going in the attic because I don’t want to see the snake skins or
run into a snake. I can only imagine what I would have done if they showed me a
human skull. Thankfully, it was an animal of some sort, but no one is quite
sure of what kind of animal. I’ve decided to dub it a unicorn. They guys are
thinking a sheep or goat, but yeah, I’m going with unicorn. Ghon just Googled sheep
skulls, and is going with sheep. Now why is a sheep skull buried in our house
foundation…
Only one side of the floor was able to be resupported and leveled, knowing we
could not find a way into left side of the room. After the bathtub was removed,
Ghon could see dirt near the plumbing and decided to pull off the plywood to
see underneath. Here is where you can either 1 – curse that he did, because he
found a new issue. Or 2 – be thankful he did as we found a support log with damage
that needs to be corrected. The discovery brought us to a standstill. There
wasn’t enough room to get under the floor to jack the floor to support and
level it out. There was also a concern regarding putting pressure on the floor
to jack up the living room ceiling joists. There could be a plan in place that
starts tomorrow – but it took a lot of deliberations and a variety of ideas to
come up with a plan.
After this discovery, the damaged
beam, not just the skull, a fire was built, a BBQ dinner served and a bit of
relaxation followed. We slowly started bidding our friends goodbye, and were
able to get a pic with most of our help.
Remember the long list of to-do
items? Here’s what we did:
Inside Jobs
Hang sister joists
Install new joists
Remove remaining drywall from living room
Remove drywall from dining room
Remove electric from living room
Remove electric from dining room
Remove linoleum from kitchen floor
Remove linoleum from bathroom floor
Remove everything BUT the toilet from lower bath
Remove drywall from bathroom
Remove all carpet
and padding from 2nd floor
Remove carpet from stairs
Empty/clean out storage room
Remove closet from master bedroom
Remove partition from sitting room
Finish removing partition from bdrm/storage rm
Trash mattress/boxsprings
Trash recliners/chairs & wood frame furniture
Haul wood furniture to fire pit & cut
Frame in two walls, closet, bathroom wall in living room
Empty/clean out attic
What a success!
Larry & Charlotte, Kathryn
& Cecil, Kevin, Dave & Jen, Cassy, Tim, Charlie, Clint, Travis &
Aly – THANK YOU. Thank you for driving the distances you did to wreak havoc on
our house (or watch our kids). You really did take us leaps and bounds further
in this project, and we really can’t thank you enough for spending your day
with us. What an amazing day. We are nowhere near ‘done’ this project, but are
so much further along with the help of great friends. For those of you that didn’t
make it and wanted to – let’s pick a day to share the fun. There will be so
much more to do.
All those walls....GONE!
Out comes the final piece of carpet off the stairs.
That's what they looked like before.
