the saga, revisited...

Another two weeks have gone by, but let's catch up again on the saga:

It turns out the contractor I interviewed and took on a walk through of the house had either the flu or walking pneumonia for a week and a half, which explains why he didn't get back in touch with me. I actually found this out when I called another potential contractor about the work... It turns out the second guy didn't get his license last summer when the big law changed in Georgia, but he recommended the first guy I talked to. I told second guy that I had already spoken with first guy, and the second guy told me that first guy had been sick.

Sorry if that was confusing.

Long story short (too late), walking pneumonia guy returned my call a day or two later and proposed a bid, or rather, a strategy. And after a week of contemplation and talking to my family, I accepted.

This was all two weeks ago, as is my updating fashion. But here's where my demo contractor left off, and a review (with images!) of the problems:

This is my kitchen floor. And the dirt below it. These are the floor joists that aren't attached to the wall. At all. Any of them. Bad angle, but this a recap, remember? The wall to your diagonal left is the bowed-out wall.

This is the view looking through the back wall of the kitchen onto the back porch area, which also at some point became the bathroom area for Apartment 1. Notice the lack of floor where the bathroom was- it was beyond rotten and terrible. To your left you see the screened-in porch floor.

Here I'm standing in what will be the master closet, looking out across what was the bathroom and onto the back porch. This was the the place where the hot water heaters lived, and there was no access out onto this porch from the house. You had to climb through the jungle to get here.

I'm standing on the dirt below where the bathroom was, with a close up of the sill here, just to show you how badly these needed to be replaced.

And here we have the sill in the bathroom for Apartment B, where the bathroom will go back.

I had to wedge myself against stacked lumber, two displaced mantels, and a set of scaffolding to get this picture, but it is of the bowed-out kitchen wall and the floating floor joists.

So, Flu Contractor is going to replace the sills around the master closet, the sills in the bathroom in the center of the house, and the sills of two walls in the kitchen. He will fix the bowed-out wall in the kitchen correctly, and entirely rebuild the back wall in the kitchen. He will also move the load-bearing wall that sits in-between the kitchen and master bath out about a foot to 18 inches, whatever the sister-ed rafters above allow without having to change the foundation below.

He estimates that this will take a week.