Several of my acquaintances have been battling their own home repair gremlins in recent years. It's been going around. I've heard stories of ceilings hosed by ice damming, patios undermined by chipmunk cities, dead raccoons in the wall, basements turned into small lakes, and of course damage from those classic arboreal menaces - creeping roots and flying limbs (this last item being one of my personal specialties).
My story is similar. But recently, it's picked up steam. I've striven to be more creative in my homeowner woes, and with a little luck (very little) I've succeeded. It all started last November with a dip in our cottage floor. Well, the dip didn't start last November. It had been there since we acquired the cottage in 2005. We just decided after 14 years of complaining about it that we ought to do something about it. That was my first mistake.
As with most of my projects more complicated than changing a light bulb, I put together a team. I learned long ago that the blame one will inevitably bear for home improvement mishaps can be reduced significantly by placing innocent parties between you and the end product. Teams are especially useful in this regard.
A little more about the dip might be appropriate here. As one passes from the cottage living room through the archway to the family room, a little disorientation sets in. This is caused by the floor unexpectedly sloping down about two inches. As you stumble through the next step or two, grasping at the rack of VHS movies on your right for support, stability usually returns (the exact number of steps this requires can vary during happy hour).
The prevailing theory of how this dip came to be is that the floor of the family room was actually constructed during a happy hour. As sort of a party game. And the booze ran out prematurely.
In any event, shortly after we purchased the cottage we hired a local handy man to survey the problem and recommend a course of action. He pulled back the carpet and declared that the problem was beneath the floor, in the support structure somewhere. But that a little leveling concrete might do the job. So with a bucket and a trowel our "craftsman" did his best to smooth things out.
His results were marginal at best, transforming our dip into a kind of mini mogul, some parts higher than others. But the area was actually a little less troublesome than before. It became a conversation piece, and was placed on the "someday we have to fix it" list. However, over the last couple of years we have noticed that the contours in that area of the floor have been shifting. We surmised that the leveling concrete may finally be disintegrating. It was time to act. Enter the team.
In earlier posts I've described the fall ritual that has evolved in the last few years. That would be the gathering of good friends at our cottage sometime in November to burn leaves and button up our little piece of paradise for the winter season. After doting on such guests for a few days and plying them with alcohol, they are often more than willing to help with those little additional tasks that go with maintaining a house in the woods. Last November was no exception.
After a couple of days of the usual revelry, we enlisted the guests into our quest to fix the troublesome floor. They helped us empty out the room of our valuable antiques (like grandma's breakfront) and my not-so-valuable collectibles (the aforementioned VHS tapes as well as a respectable array of sports trophies; okay, they are mostly for last place in a golf tournament, but I've grown attached to them). And of course there was the sofa sleeper, the electric organ and a bookcase full of over-sized coffee table books.
Well here are some pics of moving day. Using the dining room table as a staging area, the crew started by emptying out the largest item in the room, the breakfront.
After removing the breakfront and its contents to the sun porch and relocating the dining table to the game room, I huddled with the crew to assess the challenges represented by the electric organ (read big honkin' heavy tubes).
Here we have that Burk family beauty (it was my mother's first electric organ) nestled in among several other displaced possessions in the game room.
Then it was on to the sofa sleeper. Here are the prime movers settling this behemoth in next to the living room sectional, it's new spot for the ordeal. Not shown behind the sofa is the two-piece living room sectional stacked on itself to make room for its little brother.
As the family room contents diminished, the other rooms began to fill up. Here's a shot of the sun porch bedroom with its new charges. The breakfront tucked in for its hopefully brief visit.
And most of the rest in the game room, reclassified as a short-term storage facility.
Now, we did give the crew frequent breaks. The ladies on the team, sort of our middle management, kept track of where everything was going. Here they are in the lounge taking a well-deserved breather.
The boys were more fortunate, able to take their breaks outdoors on the deck and in the back yard recreational area. For entertainment, "we" played a relaxing game of what I call "how much can we stuff into the garage". My role in this little contest was to keep score.
Well, you know. We all recharge in our own way.
At the end of the day, we sent our excellent furniture moving team home with our heartfelt thanks, and with a sincere invitation to return for another weekend of fun putting everything back when the work was done.
We headed home ourselves the following day, turning the place over to our builder to work his magic. Here's a final shot of the old family room with just enough furniture left to share a cocktail and negotiate a repair contract.
A couple of weeks later, the work began. That started with pulling back the old carpet and bearing the ugly truth. As we suspected, the concrete leveler compound in the problem area had crumbled badly.
In addition, other spots were found that had water damage as well as a less than acceptable sub-floor.
Once all the carpet had been removed and the subfloor taken up, the real problems were revealed - a mis-hung joist compounded by a failure to secure the floor to the foundation of the house, allowing things to "settle" more than they should have.
Adding to the misery was the fact that the heat ducts beneath the floor were torn in several places and just laying disconnected on the ground. We thought the room had been a little crisp in the winter.
So, fully informed of the challenges involved, our builder Dave went to work. We visited the rehab site a couple of occasions to check on things, but basically could only see this. My family room deep in surgery.
So we just went about our business in the usual way. We just did it all in the same compact space.
In time, the patient emerged. Well healed. All better now. A nice level, attached floor, with working heat ducts and brand spanking new carpet.
In this shot in the upper left corner you can see that for good measure we added in a new eight-foot doorwall.
And, most importantly, no moguls. Just a nice, smooth, gently sloping surface into the living room (which it turns out is two inches lower than the repaired family room floor).
I was so taken with joy at the long-awaited repair of the floor and the new carpet, I felt I had to contribute to the new look. So I decided to remove the roughly 250 Star Trek video cassettes from the family room bookshelves and relocate them to a more appropriate place. Here are a few shots of my creation of that more appropriate place. Here I am assembling my Gene Roddenberry memorial video cassette storage facility. Using only the finest cheap wood in Iosco County, and a bevy of complex woodworking instruments (hammer, saw, drug-sniffing dog), I labored with love.
Here's a shot of this custom beauty installed in its new home - now known as the Star Trek room. A little more on this shrine shortly.
With the floor repairs completed and my personal itch scratched, all that was left was to restore the joint. So--I put together a team :-)
The put-it-back team looked a lot like the move-it-out team. Once you find good service providers, you really should stay with them. So in the middle of January our troop slogged back up to the cottage and partied. Phase 1 is always to get things back into the right room.
Finally, the big stuff, like the breakfront. Of course, this involves again taking all of the items it contains out, moving the storage case back into place, then putting all the dishes and such back.
Yes, this means that before the job is done everything stored in the big pieces has been moved four times - out-move-back in/out again-move-restored. I can gleefully report that none of our family heirlooms - not the Strawberry Fair china, not my grandmother's crockery serving bowl, not the antique painted jelly jars - were damaged in the project. Hallelujah.
And one final note. Here is a shot of the relocated Star Trek universe in the game room, presented mostly in the original cassette format (but not, unfortunately for you trekkers, in the original Klingon).
So, there you have it. Floor fixed. And due to the help of others, with only a modicum of personal inconvenience.
So feeling frisky, I thought, "this worked so well, what else needs repair or upgrading?" That was my second mistake. But to tell that story, I need to move to a new post.
Until then.
Grosse Pointe (read Greenbush) Charles
