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.

The Joys of Home Ownership Part 1 - The Floor

My home improvement/maintenance wars of the last few months have gotten me thinking about this joyous part of life that afflicts so many of us. So I thought I would share. Sort of blogging as emotional therapy.

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.

Then put the the stuff back on the shelves. Note the lack of those tacky Star Trek video cassettes.

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