march madness

I'm a bit behind...

Two weeks ago, my contractor began demo work at my house, with a helper. In about 5 days, they completely filled up a construction dumpster and uncovered many problems, but most of which were suspected and expected.

The sill under the bathroom needs to be replaced. It has disintegrated over the years due to water issues and old termite damage. The same is to be said of the sill under the back kitchen wall, which needs to be rebuilt. Also confirmed by the demo is that the back porch needs to be completely removed, nothing is salvageable. The sill adjacent to the rotten porch (under what will be the master bedroom closet room) is probably too far gone, too. The sub floors in the kitchen, bathroom, and master closet will most likely have to be ripped up.

A surprise found was that the side kitchen wall, the wall with the window in it, has separated from the floor joists. As in- you can see about 3 inches of daylight in between the exterior wall and where the floor joists at one point met. The previous owner knew this, blocked up the floor joists on 4x4s resting on 2x4s, and added a new (now leaning) pier underneath the 'floating' wall. At least they replaced the sill here. Too bad they didn't bother to attach it to the house.

I have pictures, but it's been a busy two weeks with work and everything, and I just haven't had time to add them to the blog. But soon...
...

Today I met with a licensed contractor at the house and spoke with him about replacing the bathroom sill, reattaching the side wall in the kitchen to the house, rebuilding the back wall in the kitchen, and checking out the rest of the sills at the back of the house. I also asked him to price moving a load-bearing wall in the house, the one in between the kitchen and the master bedroom. I wanted to move the wall to make the bedroom bigger, but it may not be in the budget at this point.

I really liked him. We talked a lot about my plans for the house, what I could do myself, and what my demo contractor can do for me sans-permit. He gave me a lot of advice and pointed out some things that would need attention in the future, but not necessarily now.

I'm expecting his bid to come in high. I'm also expecting to have to scrap moving the wall in between the kitchen and bedroom and not being able to rebuild the back porch any time soon. We'll just have to tear it off and have a back door with steps down into the yard. The back porch wasn't original to the house anyway, but I was really looking forward to having a nice, private screened-in porch.

It's all about shifting priorities and keeping a realistic budget. I don't mind moving in the house with projects left to do, in fact, that's kind of exciting to me. I never expected to have a turn-key entry when I moved in, but now I think I'm sensing the reality of which projects will have to stay imagined, and which new developments will have to be addressed, pronto.