The Joys of Home Ownership Part 3 - Reconstruction

When I left off on the yarn of pain recounted in my previous post Issues, our builder Dave was setting up for major carpentry. Let me reset the situation. My Bride and I had decided to build a new deck. The old deck, not happy with our plan, decided to resist. Inanimate objects can do that you know. They conspire all the time.

I've written about this before. Remember those pesky deck and gazebo lights that plotted against me a few summers ago? They were taking turns conveniently burning out in hard to reach places, baiting me to risk life and limb hanging off a dilapidated ladder to switch the little devils out (see the Chores headers under previous posts NFTL RDate 48.42 and NFTL RDate 76.23). Well, it was happening again.

This time the old deck, not going quietly into that dark night, got together with the sand and wind and rain and a few forest creatures and tried to take the cottage down with it. As I revealed in my last post, it wasn't pretty.

Fortunately Sheriff Dave rode into town and rousted the villains out. Their treachery was laid bare thanks to a blazing circular saw, a couple of crow bars, and a big honkin' hammer. After a session of what I would call builder tough-love, we accepted our fate and turned things over to Dave. That's where we resume.

The order of recovering from this shameless assault and reconstructing our little piece of paradise was important. Couldn't build the new deck until the front of the cottage was repaired, including new siding on at least the area behind the new deck. And we couldn't repair the front of the cottage until the bay window and its supports as well as the sun porch bedroom floor were repaired.

Also the front of the cottage couldn't be finished until the portion of the roof that had a small leak and a damaged eave were replaced. Finally, couldn't finish off the inside of the bay window area, restore the interior walls of the sun porch bedroom or replace the sun porch carpet until the outside of the house including the new door wall and windows were installed and trimmed. Sheesh.

If you followed all that, the first step was repairing the sun porch bedroom floor. So Dave went to work laying a new support structure. As the floor had to be raised a couple of inches, he had to first remove the majority of the knotty pine wall panels. In these shots you can see the disassembled walls and a portion of the new joists. Note the "former" window we discovered as the walls came down. It had been stuffed with small pieces of Styrofoam.

Once the subfloor was complete, Dave installed a header for the new door wall. Yes, that's right. The old door wall had been installed without a header. As a result it was bent beyond repair.

This looks a lot better.

With the inside of the sun porch bedroom back in good shape structurally, Dave moved to the outside to install the new door wall.

Phase 1 done, Dave moved on to the sagging bay window in the family room. Employing what I will refer to as our builder spy cam (the web cam we installed on our gazebo to monitor lake activity) we were able to follow this portion of the work from afar. This next photo captures the problem. Note the tired frame.

Within the lower wooden facade the bay window was actually being supported by a couple of steel stanchions resting on small wood squares, the whole assembly slowly sinking into the ground.

After pouring cement footings and constructing proper supports for the bay windows, it looked a lot better.

Add the new windows and some moisture barrier, and Voila!

And from the inside, just as nice though only roughed in at this point.

The new front of the cottage was finally taking shape, everything level and properly supported. Here's a shot with the windows, new sun porch bedroom door wall and moisture barrier all complete. Our larger family room door wall - at the left in this picture - survived this crisis as it had been replaced the previous November with the rebuild of the family room floor (see The Joys of Home Ownership Part 1).

With the internal structural problems addressed, it was time to shift gears to the outside. This started with installation of the two remaining windows needed on the north wall of the sun porch bedroom. Followed by trimming out the windows and completing the siding on that wall (Dave convinced us that the old siding was too flimsy to hold back the weather, and likely couldn't be matched anyway; so we agreed to replace it all with super-baked-on-paint-50 year warranty stuff - double sheesh).

Then it was on to installing siding on the front wall high enough to cover the portion that would eventually be behind the new deck.

At this point, Dave was actually able to start building the deck, as the floor of the deck would serve as a platform for the rest of the outside work. Here's how that went.

This is a shot of his deck floor plan. Roughly the same shape of the old deck but two feet wider and with an elevated section outside of the family room (to accommodate the two different levels of the door walls). The shape of the deck is driven by the weird property line which is angled to the shore line. But that's another story.

First Dave laid out the beams according to the drawing.

Then his helper mixed up some cement and they set the beams into place using u-shaped beam supports that anchored down into the cement. Battleship.

All was going swimmingly, but then something very scary happened. This truck pulled up on the US Highway 23 shoulder across from our driveway.

It was the remaining lumber for the deck. At first I wondered how the driver was going to unload all that material from across the street. I had some spooky flashbacks as I in my youth had worked at a lumber yard loading and unloading (much smaller) trucks. The memories were not pleasant. Sore back, pinched fingers, slivers - you get the idea.

But I quickly snapped back to the moment as this happened.

And this.

And finally this.

Yes. You're seeing this clearly. The truck driver had uncoupled his tractor unit, converted it to a fork lift, and deftly maneuvered the load across the highway, and down my drive between my car and Dave the builder's tool van. And laid it gently onto my slab. I helped, making sure the slab didn't move.

 And presto! The deck was delivered! Sort of. In pieces.

"Well", you say, "That wasn't so scary." Right. Here's what I left out. The driver backed his tractor out over the median to the other side of the highway, turned at a right angle to back the forks under the load, slowly lifted the lumber off the truck bed, then worked his rig back and forth in the middle of the highway until he had made a 180 degree turn. And finally backed the load down the driveway. All the while, US 23 was in full operation.

That means that while this delicate vehicular dance was in process, there were at least a dozen cars and trucks that zoomed past doing 60 mph plus (the usual speed for this little stretch of "The Great Lakes Circle Tour"). Many of these wheeled missiles had to swerve wide left or wide right to avoid disaster. And as we live just south of a big curve, builder Dave posted himself about 50 yards up the road so he could wave off the southbound traffic in time.

The reason I don't have any pictures of this is that I was in a panic during the suicidal portion of the process and unable to operate my equipment. I have this memory of my head jerking back and forth looking first north and then south and then north - and so on - assuring myself that nothing bad was going to happen.

For a belt and suspenders risk-averse guy like me, it was scary. All Dave said when it was over was, "that was interesting". The driver, cool and calm in his baggy shorts seemed to be oblivious to it all. Just another day at the office. I guess I haven't fully adapted to up north life yet.

So. Now with the structural repairs done and the deck lumber delivered, our builder was back to where he thought he was several weeks ago. Before the "issues" were discovered. Ready to finish the job. But that will take another post. See you soon for The Joys of Home Ownership Part 4 -Restoration.

Grosse Pointe Charles