Matching Tracksuits

The light was particularly beautiful this morning given the fact that I knew we would be spending the whole day in the crawl space.

It was a blessing and a curse, really. The heat outside was so oppressive that it was really almost pleasant in the crawl space, which made it a welcome change from yesterday. On the other hand, it’s the crawl space.

Out mission was simple: deal with a 3/4 inch sag in the dining room portion of the floor.

A seven-foot level showed the problem clearly. The idea behind the solution was simple: build two piers to hold a new support beam under the affected area. An easy idea with a back-breaking implementation.

But the beam is up, and the jacks are still temporarily in place. “The floor will need to settle a little before we make any definitive moves,” my mentor/guide explained.

For now, things look good.

A header is meant to support the span of the door so that the weight of the house is not actually on the door but on the header above the door. What happens if you don’t build the header correctly? You’ll have weight bearing down on things that aren’t designed to take weight.

What happens if you don’t build the header correctly and the door is on the corner of the house? You get a door that’s almost impossible to open.

What happens if you put a lot more weight on a floor than it’s designed to handle and leave it there for a long time. You’ll get a lot of sag. Approximately 5/8 to 3/4 inch in our case.

See that “header” above the door? All the weight was on those 2×4’s nailed together, which in turn sit on two 2×4’s below them. That’s why the door wouldn’t open.

Apparently, the holding mess that was in the house a couple of owners ago was concentrated in the dining area, which is why the floor sags there.

These two “whichs” are why my mentor said, “Well, we’re putting off electrical for a few more days so we can fix the structural issues.”

So with the help of a third man, we built a temporary wall to support the structure while we knocked out the “header.” Then we jacked up the roof and installed two LVL beams to make a new header for the entire door/window section, making sure that the supports for the beams rested on the columns below in the crawl space.

And by then, it was time to quit. So we boarded up the gaping hole, hung plastic to protect it all from rainfall, cleaned up, and called it a day.

Well, the other two gentlemen called it a day (at least for this project). I continued by clearing the floor of any debris and marking the floor, with the help of a six-foot level, for the areas where it sags.

Tomorrow we get to do it all again, except in the crawl space, without the ridiculously heavy LVL beams.

I’d like to find out who the “contractor” is that put this together and send photos of this “work” to every building inspector in the county along with his name. “You might want to check his work carefully.”

The plan was to begin working on the electrical today, laying out and planning everything, starting to pull wire in the afternoon. That would be blown, I knew, because I knew just how bad that leak in the winter had been, and I knew what the subfloor would look like.

Sure enough, that because evident Saturday during demolition day.

Another thing became evident: we would have to do something about the door to the deck. The header wasn’t much of a header. But when we chalked a line above the 2×8 that ran across the top of the windows, ostensibly supporting them, and saw a 3/8 inch difference between the middle edge and the corners, we realized we had more work to do.

So the subfloor work gets moved to Wednesday as we spend tomorrow fixing this huge issue.

And the electrical? Well, who knows?

On the upside, the cucumbers and blueberries are growing nicely, and the outdoor kitchen is functioning very well indeed.

A second pickup truck load of debris and we haven’t even technically started demolition. Or have we?

The point of no return — the point after which there is no way but forward. In truth, we passed that point long, long ago — over a week ago. But the evidence as been piling up in the back of our neighbor’s truck.

This afternoon, we reached a point that we had to take the first load off to the dump. Something of a milestone, I guess. So now the truck sits almost empty, waiting for the next load of refuse.

It’ll have to wait for the sink, though. I took it around to the back of the house, threw together a pedestal, and using the adapter I got during my nightly Home Depot outings, attached the hose to the faucet and presented K with a cold water field sink. The outlet drops the water at the base of one of our three remaining Leyland Cypresses. Our neighbors probably think we’re insane.

The kitchen is looking less like a kitchen. All the decorative trim, both crown molding and baseboards, are gone, and a whole section of cabinets are now in the landfill. Tomorrow, the range, vent hood, oven, and dishwasher come out, as well as most of the upper cabinets and as much of the lower as I can work through. I’d like to have it all out for demolition day so we can focus on the chore of getting the floor up, but that might not be possible.

At any rate, we’ve moved the last of our necessary kitchen items to the basement. For the next eight weeks or so, it will be a kitchen, dining room, office, and pantry. The best part of the arrangement, though, is the ability to reach over to the refrigerator to get another handful of our quick-and-easy pickles that take only twenty-four hours to go from cucumbers to little slices of paradise.

The upshot of all this: real, visible progress now.

We sat down to dinner, and I had a feeling of progress. Which might have been a little odd to an outside observer because, truthfully, most everything looks the same as it did yesterday.

The only difference in the kitchen are missing ceiling fixtures. The only difference in the laundry room, where the load center is located and where most of our work has been concentrated, is only a few wires moved to more future-remodel-compliant locations.

Otherwise, it appears to be all the same.

Appearance will catch up Saturday, with demolition day — not to be confused with Demolition Man…

“There is nothing more disruptive to your life than remodeling your kitchen,” explained a neighbor who is also a contractor. Were we hiring him to gut and rebuild our kitchen, it would take five weeks, he assured us. We’re saving several thousand dollars by doing a lot of it ourselves and doing our own subcontracting for the rest, so that means we’re looking at about eight weeks.

Eight weeks without a kitchen. How will we do it? “Eat out a lot,” an acquaintance at work suggested. Thanks, but that eats into the money we’re saving by doing it ourselves. We just have to be a little creative.

For example, after demolition day (this coming Saturday), we’ll be moving our sink down to the area just outside our lower entrance, running a connection via the hose pipe, and running the drain to the Leyland Cypresses that will be just behind our makeshift field sink. No hot water, that’s true, but water. As for cooking, we’re about to see what all a grill and slow cooker are capable of.

For other items, we’ve converted our basement office into a kitchen/dining area. The microwave sits on the workbench in the adjacent room, and the refrigerator squeeze in beside the desk on Friday, once we’ve installed an outlet on its own breaker ostensibly too keep the fridge from throwing the breaker but in reality for the sump pump. It’ll have to do dual duty for a while, though.

In the meantime, components for our new kitchen began arriving today. The flooring guy brought all the planks for our new hardwood floors in the kitchen so they’ll have time to acclimate to our home before installation on July 1. So counting what’s going on in the living room now, we have parts of three kitchens in our home.

The level of craziness in our lives is about to ramp up dramatically.