Project Update: Week 4


Welcome to Week 4! It's pretty funny to me that one of the contractors I talked to said this was a 4 month project... and while I found that hard to believe then, it's laughable now. Silly you.

This week was really all about telling me how things weren't perfect. If the first couple weeks were about taking the house down to the studs, now we are fixing the studs. The house used to stand so straight and strong when it was all covered up (e.g. walls, bushes at the foundation, etc) but when you strip those items away ... you can see the hacky flaws that made it stand straight.

Which is fine, this is a 100+ year old beach house. A fact that I'm still singing from the roof tops and... one of the reasons that I'm not looking for perfection. I'm just looking for a happy, healthy house to live in ... where the roof doesn't leak, the foundation doesn't crumble, and the electricity doesn't start a fire.

The quick rundown is the crew spent much of this week:
  • taking down the old fireplace .... and saving the bricks for me
  • replacing rotten wood and trying to level out the primary structure
  • prepping for the house lift / move / foundation ... the lot is all dirt now. No more stumps.
I'm going to miss about a million details but those are my takeaways. I got a text from Jim one day during work alerting me that I wasn't allowed in the house anymore.... uh oh. So for the rest of the week, I just imagined what was happening inside the walls. It also put a damper on my video diaries.

On Friday, Jim and I met up to actually walk through. It's pretty much when he explains to me what the crew has been working on and I nod. Then, he tells me my next homework assignments. During our walk through, Jim explained that the house leaned like 1 3/4 back from the street. So that was kind of what they were trying to address - while reinforcing all the interior beams and framing that just had never been strong enough in the first place.

Immediately when you stood on the first floor you could see the new framing pop out. New wood next to old wood is quite the contrast. All of this work also meant pulling up the flooring where the kitchen used to be ... and then all the way over to the mudroom. It's pretty much like a personal sandbox to play in - except this one comes with nails and all the old stuff people don't know is under their house.

Decisions

  • After a lot of back and forth about options, I delegated the french door mullion decision to Jim. I just couldn't visualize how this all came together... and he's done it a million times.
  • I finally decided on the front door. Now, I need to decide on the back door.
  • Picked out the fireplace for the downstairs at Anderson Fireplace

What's coming up?

Theoretically we are beginning to lift the house in week 5. So the big steel beams and other prep materials will begin to arrive. I also need to design the kitchen. If you think the front door was a process, just wait for the kitchen.
 
 

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