Thursday, September 15, 2011

This old house






Our house is over a hundred years old. We have noticed a couple of odds and ends around the house that we wanted to fix and while Unity and I were gone this weekend, our friend Dan the amazing carpenter started working on them. It was just a couple of rotten boards in the back deck, and then there was a place in the basement at the end of the stairs that looked like there might be water in the walls. Well. As you know, with an old house, it's never that easy. The boards on the deck got replaced sure enough, and then Dan and his friend Philipe went to work on the basement wall. They pulled off some of the siding and then made that face. That face that says "Oh. This is going to be a lot more work then we planned." That face that makes your wallet shrink right then and there. It turns out that the former owner of our house who built the deck took some shortcuts, or maybe just didn't really know what he was doing, and all of the deck's weight was being supported by one beam, which had water damage. The weight was also being carried by our basement stairs, which were not connected to anything, and were slowly buckling under the weight. So, on the plus side at least we discovered all this before something collapsed. On the unexpected side, we are now rebuilding the basement stairs. Which will be good in the long run since those stairs were incredibly steep and narrow, but we weren't really planning on it at this stage in the game. ah well. That's what you get with old houses, right?

1 comment:

grandma cindy said...

Oh, my! Even though you had told me about this, it took me a second look to figure these pictures out. Your basement stairs are outside the house. How crazy is that?!! Looking forward to the "after" pictures.