Home is a Process

Before you scroll down and read my missive about our weekend of manual labor, you should note that I’ve finally gotten around to adding a “subscribe by email” button over on the edge of the blog. This means that you can be personally notified when I’ve gotten around to publicly whining about the trials & tribulations of building a house.

I’ve also added an RSS feed button. For those of you (family members?) who might not be familiar with concept of syndicated feeds, there is a nice, easy intro here, and a more in-depth article here. If this all seems too technical, and overly complicated, I’d suggest that you just use the email subscription link listed above. (Though I have to admit that I’ve recently become a big user of Google Reader for the convenience and for tracking those occasional bloggers such as myself. It doesn’t work so well with the big commercial websites that add new content every 2.5 seconds.)

However you choose to do it, thanks for reading.

This photo encapsulates all the reasons that we’re totally exhausted, our hands are blistered, and I’ve taken to adding Ibuprofin to my regular diet. (On the Ibuprofen front, Luke is choosing to suffer based on his ridiculous belief that by abstaining from the wonders of modern-ish medicine, his liver will remain fully intact.)

We got a lot done this weekend. We’ve (temporarily) pulled off the kitchen-building project, in an effort to get the new concrete floor poured in the old house. In case I haven’t given enough background in previous posts, the 100 year-old portion of the house has a field stone foundation that was set directly on the dirt, and then had a floor of wood joists that were set on the foundation, a few microns above the dirt. Even though we live in the world’s driest climate (next to the Gobi desert), the floor joists eventually succumbed to rot & powder post beetles. When we bought the house, the floor was being magically levitated beneath the hardwood tongue & groove flooring, which was providing an amazing amount of strength & stiffness to the whole sad assembly. Over the years, the previous owners had embarked on several poorly-conceived spelunking missions under the floor, and attempted to shore up the sagging floor with a combination of lumpy rocks and miscellaneous lumber. This resulted in a network of nightmares that our perfectionist natures demanded we remove ASAP.

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This week marked our first anniversary. No, not a wedding anniversary (we got to spend that one rescuing relatives from a broken alternator belt). It was not the sort of anniversary that was celebrated with cards or roses or golden rings… we celebrated this one with some non-ceremonial shoveling of concrete and a the ritual bandaging of bloody gashes. (Actually, it was only one gash: a gift from a shin-high piece of rebar.)

A year ago (June 26th), we stood with rose-colored glasses before a lawyer, promised our undying (30-year) devotion to the bank, and performed a symbolic exchange of keys. The key exchange was truly symbolic since the front door lock hasn’t worked in a decade, the back door (now removed) could have been opened with a pocket knife, and the other key seemed to belong to a rusty padlock, which may or may not have kept any would-be thieves from stealing the broken vacuum cleaner and the endless cans of roofing tar that were included with the place– no extra charge!

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We were away last week– visiting our aging grandparents in Michigan & Kentucky. It was good to get away, and good to see our families. I hardly thought about the house or the businesses for an entire week, which is a huge luxury. Luke didn’t get to bask in the luxury quite so much, and still had to answer phone calls.

We’re back now, and somehow the vacation didn’t quite “take,” I fear. We’re trying to do too much, but unsure of how to change the patterns or reduce the stress. Owning a small business is stressful enough– add to that the task of completely rebuilding a house from scratch with little cash, very little hired help– and it is a recipe for burnout. Our problem is that we want 3 things from this project: we want it “good” (designed to our specifications, and well-built), we want it cheap, and we want it done quickly. The old adage says that you can have 2 of the 3, but never all 3 at once. I don’t know why we think we can break the universal laws of building! Up until now, we’ve let the “quick” part go by the wayside, but it is starting to feel like progress is painfully slow, and we’ve got to change some things in order to get a place to live. It’s only June and already I can feel the snowballs hitting us in the ass. We don’t want to be a burden on our landlord/ patrons, we’re trying to pay for things out of pocket as much as possible to reduce the double-triple-quadruple payment that comes from having your life mortgaged to the bank. We’re stretched as thin as we can be (gas prices aren’t helping!). Sometimes we feel like building this house the way we are is making a huge investment in our financial future– putting money into a savings account that we can draw on in the future by not having to slave away to pay off a big mortgage. But the price is that we’re “slaving” now– giving up all our free time, all our disposable income, and every shred of disposable energy. We don’t have time to make friends here, and right now that feels like it makes life a lot harder. Neither one of us is spending time doing things we’d like to do just for fun. We work 7 days a week, and indulge in only three luxuries: Netflix, burritos at Jose’s Taqueria, and occasional self-pity. (I especially enjoy the last one.) We keep telling ourselves that there will be a big payoff at the end– that it will all be worthwhile in the end, and that we’re getting a great education in the process. Can you tell I’m a little blue?

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Well, after days of going non-stop, we crashed yesterday (friday) afternoon. Curt was ready to go home (he had been camping at the jobsite), and we were ready for a mega-nap. Curt cleaned up his stuff and left, we tried to secure the premises, and then we left. Today, we’re taking the day “off”– that is, trying to catch up on business stuff, trying to get in a little blog writing, plus all those other pesky things like laundry, dishes, etc. etc. Mostly, I fear the day will consist of a long series of naps & attempts to decompress.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and we’ve been to preoccupied to remember our mothers with any sort of shower of gifts & cards. So, Mom, hope you enjoy these pictures– I’ve posted them for you because I know that you’ll enjoy looking at them.

We started out this project-within-a-project by saw cutting out a piece of the basement floor in order to pour a new footer under the northern structural wall in the kitchen. In reality, the concrete was so strong, that it would probably have never gone anywhere– or even cracked. But by code we needed a proper footer, and we needed to get it inspected. So we busted out the old concrete slab, dug out the dirt beneath, and poured a new footer. This was really tiring work, and luckily it also involved hauling a bunch of broken concrete & dirt up the stairs, and then hauling buckets of wet concrete down the stairs. It would be a real shame if anything about this project proved to be easy.

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I’ll have to write this post quickly, before I am overcome by fatigue. My apologies for the complete lack of pictures– I promise that I’ll add a few before the week is out. For the moment, it just seems like too much effort to dig the camera out of my bag, and share the visuals.

This last week (all 14 days of it) has been really stressful, but has also resulted in a LOT of progress on our little house project. A while back, I had the idea to ask a friend / client of ours by the name of Curt to help us reframe the kitchen on the back of the house. This is among the smartest ideas I’ve ever had (if I do say so myself). Luke has done quite a bit of work for Curt on his solar systems (which tended to be a bit raggedy around the edges– kind of like our kitchen), and so we were able to convince him to come & do some work on our house in exchange for Luke’s work on his house. I didn’t know it at the time, but the reason that my idea was so amazingly brilliant, is that Curt is the real deal. He knows his way around a framing square, and he’s evidently built more buildings than you can shake a stick at. He’s efficient & exacting, and quick. And he clearly knows how to coddle a motley crew of people (such as ourselves) into making progress happen. I have no doubt that, given 6-8 months of indecision, head scratching, and mistake-making, we probably could have framed up this little addition ourselves. We’ve got some idea of how to build things, and all that. But instead, (did I mention that this was my brilliant idea?) we’re getting it done this week. By the end of the week, I have every confidence that the kitchen will be framed, sheathed, and ready for plumbing/ wiring.

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The reason it’s not easy to renovate a house is that every single thing is connected to everything else in a giant web of sticky, knotted fibers. Our primary goal at this point is to get the upstairs (bedroom, bathroom, temporary kitchen) livable ASAP, so that we can get a temporary occupancy permit and move in. However, it’s not that simple. The tangle goes something like this:

Before we start working on the upstairs, we have to get the new concrete floor poured downstairs in the western (or “old”) portion of the house. This has to be done before touching the upstairs because: 1) We’re ready to get rid of the dirt floor that presently exists downstairs & 2) The new plumbing runs under the new slab, so we can’t get any new plumbing upstairs until that rough-in is done. However, we can’t move forward with pouring the floor until we’ve poured new footers to support the structural walls. But we can’t pour the footers until we’ve had them inspected. But we’ve also got another footer to pour in the newer portion of the house. (This portion of the house has a basement under it.) We don’t have the budget to pay the inspector to run out for every little thing, so we’ve got to have both of those footers inspected at the same time. In the mean time, we’ve got a friend coming to reframe the kitchen over the basemented portion of the house, so we have to prepare for him to do the work. This means demolishing much of the old kitchen. And, just because things aren’t complicated enough, the electric meter is in exactly the wrong place, and has to be moved. So Luke met with the power company & discovered that we can’t move the meter without paying for an additional lift pole to be installed in the yard, and getting a permanent easement from the neighbor to run over his property. Since that all seemed too expensive & difficult, we decided to move the meter to the shed that sits out on the alley & run the service into the house underground. This is all well & good, but we can’t get the electric company to move the meter until we’ve had the electrical inspector inspect the new meter base. Now, one problem with putting the meter on the shed is that the shed is leaning to the south (due to the previous owner’s lack of understanding of the need for sheer in a building). So we “kinda” need to straighten the shed before installing the meter. And… and… and

Is your head spinning yet? Mine is. That’s why I think I should have named this blog, “Renovating Pandora’s Box.”

Sometimes, when the task of building this house “in our spare time” gets overwhelming, and it feels like we’re not getting much accomplished, it helps to make a list of all the things that we’ve done, so that we can feel self- righteous about our work ethic. This was one of those days when it felt like we didn’t get a lot done, and the amount of work ahead of us seems overwhelming. So why not indulge in a little self-congratulatory review of the things we’ve done since buying this wreck of a house?

1) We ripped down the moldy old greenhouse. While the idea of green-house-ness is very appealing and earthy, this greenhouse was nothing but gross. In this part of the country, the UV is not kind to things– least of all poorly built fiberglass greenhouses that have no ventilation worth mentioning. The first thing I did after we bought the house, was to run right down to the building department and ask them for a demo permit so that we could tear it down. After they stopped laughing at me (apparently people around here don’t generally ask for demo permits), we got out our crowbars and went to work. The green fiberglass disappeared into the dump trailer, and was delivered to its final resting place next to someone’s dead refrigerator. The wood got de-nailed, and is being re-used whenever possible. (When jacking up various parts of your house, it is amazing how often the gross greenhouse lumber can come in handy.) The concrete blocks got broken up into a pile of rubble. This rubble is finding its way into the cavernous holes that pepper the obstacle course (aka mountain road) that leads to my in-laws’ house. (more…)