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

The Joys of Home Ownership Part 2 - Issues

Okay. I know. Where have I been for nearly five months? I could fully explain but you'd glaze over after a minute or two. To summarize - Florida, the holidays, Florida again, a nighttime blowout on the freeway in a Tennessee rain, and a double-hat trick of run-ins with the medical community including something called a vitrectomy (look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls). So, I'm ready to slide back into the blogosphere. Actually, I'd like to hide in here for awhile.

When I slipped away last September, I had concluded reporting on what I thought at the time was a fairly extensive home repair at our cottage. That was shoring up of our sagging family room floor and the installation of new carpet. We threw in a new sliding glass door to the deck for good measure. As it turned out, that was just a taste.

Happy with our nifty (and level) new family room floor, we thought "what else could we do to spruce up the cottage? Hey, what about a new deck?" The old one was a bit (a large bit) tired. If we kept it we would be staining it again soon, a job we enjoy less with every passing year. And as progressive-thinking seniors, we asked that always pertinent question "what are we waiting for?" So with eyes wide open (as well as our pocketbook), we plowed ahead.

Our first step seemed obvious. We called our builder Dave and set a meeting. We had a nice chat. We sorted out the details for a bigger, more elegant natural wood deck for the cottage. We also discussed and arrived at a mutually agreeable price for the project. I will refer to this reasonable amount as "x". More on that later.

To launch the project, our builder first had to remove the old deck. Before he started we cleared away the tables, chairs, deck equipment, hose fixtures and electrical appurtenances and moved them to a secure storage facility (the garage). So far so good. Here are a few final shots of the old deck, standing naked in the path of progress, offering itself up for the good of humanity. Or at least for the pleasure of our family and friends.

As far as we can tell this deck was added sometime in the 90s when the original deck was replaced with the family room (yes, the same room and crappy floor that was the subject of my last post). Sections of the deck show differing construction styles, so it may have been completed in stages. We'll likely never know. Despite its tired look, this deck provided us with several years of memories and will always be looked back upon with fondness. Except for those hours Nancy (the painter in the family) spent hand-staining the 100+ railing spindles. At least three times that I can remember.

Respects having been paid, let's move on. Here are a few shots of the deck as she went not-so-gently into that eternal night. Power tools were involved. The project engineer shown here is of course our builder Dave.

Here is a shot of the carpenter's caisson that eventually conveyed the remains of our former front porch to their interment, somewhere deep in the Greenbush Township woods. Where old lumber usually starts its journey to the next astral plane.

The extraction complete, the now laid-bare ground was ready to receive its new tenant.

Or so we thought. Notice the unusual looking supports under the bay window? And the somewhat porous wood panel at the base of the doorwall to the right? Dave noticed them, too (although to him I think they looked more like a tapestry of dollar signs). Both items were revealed when Dave removed a few pieces of the brown siding as part of the deck removal.

In retrospect, at this point we should have had him slap the disguising lengths of siding back into place and cancelled the whole deal. Go with a few potted plants and some lawn chairs in front of the cottage instead of a new deck. But no. We were too far down the rabbit hole at this point. Our children, used to high style and comfort, would never have accepted that. So, we crawled in a little further. Here's how it happened.

We were enjoying life back in The Pointes confident that our fancy new deck was taking shape in our little piece of paradise. Then our phones buzzed. It was Dave. He had texted us a few photos with the brief but scary words "we have issues." Yikes. Here's what we saw staring up at us from our Samsungs. This first shot is a close up of the corner. I can only say yecch.

Moving down the front of the house to the bay window.

And under the bay window, what has been passing as support.

And back under the smaller doorwall. We call this the chipmunk grand entrance.

If you look closely through the gap in the wood you can just make out the little acorn toll booth that has been a gold mine for which ever little critter got there first.

It didn't take long for us to realize that all this stuff had to be repaired before we could even think about building our new dream deck. So we hopped in the Traverse and made the trip up to examine the wreckage. We conferred with Dave ( who was doing his best to contain his good fortune). We hemmed and hawed and fretted and grimaced. And finally said the only thing we possibly could. "Dave, can you please make it all better?"

If you remember at the beginning of this post there was a sum of money I referred to as "x". That was the initial estimate for the new deck. Suffice it to say, the result of the "issues" development was that we were now in the ball park of "2x". But that wasn't all of it.

As Dave began deconstruction of the front of the house he had a couple more revelations. The first was that the sun porch bedroom floor, behind the chipmunk thruway shown above, had suffered over the years. It had sagged about two inches from its original position. Pulling back the old carpet in that room revealed that the first eight feet of the floor was an old patio slab. The remaining 40 inches or so was a wooden sub-floor added to bring the wall out flush with the adjacent family room. Here's a shot of the de-carpeted floor.

And a second shot with the wooden portion partially removed.

Note the aluminum tube sticking out from under the joist on the right. Odd, you say. I call that ductus interruptus. That tube runs over from the front furnace and is supposed to continue on over to the floor duct located in the remaining portion of the floor shown on the left. We always wondered why this room always seemed cold despite the fact that it contained the furnace closet. This could be the result of shoddy workmanship. Either that or a chipmunk gang has been raising cash by stripping the joint of precious metals.

And, oh yeah, the eaves. Bad. several rotten boards. Ugly.

Finally, our diligent builder pointed out to us that reconstructing the front of the cottage to raise the floor in the bedroom and build proper supports for the bay window would require destruction of a large portion of the current aluminum siding which would be - of course - impossible to match. Not to mention that all of the wooden casings in the bay windows and the windows around the corner to the north side of the sun porch were rotten, and should be replaced. That's five windows.

Our builder was quite philosophical about the whole thing. The cottage has stood for about 50 years now. Thirty of those in it's current configuration. Being constantly slammed by Lake Huron winds, water and sand. Throw in some crappy original construction materials and what is referred to in the building industry as "an owner job", and there you have it. Inevitable disaster. I sure felt better.

So Dave started on the next steps of ripping things out, propping things up, and methodically starting to make it all better. As we packed up and headed for home, things looked like this.

As we pulled out of the driveway, leaving our wounded piece of paradise in Dave's capable hands, I had only one thought. We were now at "3x".

I'll leave you at this point. At the nadir of our home-ownership woes. And pick up the story in my next post - Reconstruction.

Until then, Grosse Pointe Charles.