Diary Of A House: Part 4

Chapter 5: Construction begins

So here it finally was… the rehabbing of my house was about to begin. Several of the upstairs walls needed to be replaced because of the extensive damage that had occurred from neglect. Well about 2 hours into the demolition my dad decides that it would be foolish to tear down just one or two walls and most likely have to do the rest in a few years, so he said we would be replacing all the walls. Thanks dad. Let’s not do some work now and some work in a few years, let’s turn a big project into a HUGE project and make me work twice as hard now. So we continued to rip down plaster and it was messy and heavy and made my eyes water and lungs fill with dust. After about 8 hours of hammering the plaster to bits and hauling it out to the truck, my dad decided that it was time to call it a day. Finally! I can now collapse on the couch and take a nap. No can do. My phone rang with a computer job. Well I needed the money so I got up to take a shower and head on out. Well you may not know this and if you don’t, here is a bit of advice should you ever run into this situation. Shake all the plaster dust out of your hair before you take a shower. I stepped into the shower and the water and plaster combined to form a nice paste on my head. It took 5 shampooings to get most of that shit out of my hair and even after all that my hair was able to be styled without any product.

New from Revlon: Plasterfique. You’ll never need moose or hairspray again.

For several weeks after that it was pretty much the same thing. Work at Depot 5 days a week then work on the house on the weekends. Eventually all the plaster was torn down and we started ripping down the lathe behind it. After ripping it all down from the walls we moved to the ceiling where we were once again greeted with two surprises. The studs for the wall that separated the two smaller bedrooms stopped at the flooring. My father was previously under the assumption that that particular wall was a supporting wall. We could now take down that wall and turn it into one big bedroom. This new revelation was a pleasant and welcome surprise to our project. The second surprise was less than encouraging. The studs for all the walls did not go all the way up to the support beams in the ceiling. They instead went up into the lathe and the lathe was nailed into the ceiling. So that means once the lathe was removed, there was about a half inch gap between the studs and the support beams overhead. Well after a lot of swearing by my dad, we now had another thing to add onto the list of projects; removing all the studs. So once all the studs were removed, I had a very large upstairs and a bathroom. Not too shabby I thought. Well my dad came over the next week and my dreams of starting the actual construction were trashed. Over the week he was thinking it would be better to tear down the bathroom and redo that too. Well I was a little frustrated that we would once again be tearing down plaster and lathe, but I could see where he was coming from. The pipes in the bathroom had to be as old as the rest of the house and they looked like they were put together by a family member who’s only plumbing experience came from watching a few episodes of This Old House. At least with the bathroom being removed, I wouldn’t have to look at the stupid accentuated plaster cracks Anastasia and her mother painted when we moved in.

After the bathroom upstairs was ripped out my dad decided to look at the rest of the plumbing in the house. We headed into the basement to look at some pipes and see if any of them needed to be replaced. They were mostly made of galvanized steel which was ok, but copper was preferred. Well we took out one of the pipes to see if there was any rust inside. Well there was. When I say that there was rust in there, what I mean is, “How the hell did water ever squeeze through those pipes and come out of my faucets?” How did I ever drink the water here? I’d go out and get a tetanus booster if I could afford it. So off to home depot I went to get some new copper pipe so I could have some clean water and not feel so dirty after a shower.

Plumbing actually wasn’t too bad. You get a whole lot of pipe, a bunch of connectors, a blow torch, some solder and start piecing stuff together. After two days I had all new pipes and the water pressure was fantastic. I love it when you can actually see the fruits of your labors. Now it was time to move upstairs and begin constructing my bedrooms and new bathroom. Or so I thought…

Well the weather started warming up and when the weather is warm you have to take advantage of it. To my father, that meant one thing. Yard work. I hate hard work. I put off mowing my lawn until the grass gets so long that I can actually trip over it. My lawnmower chokes and slows down when I mow because my lawn has turned into a mini forest of grass. My backyard has become a jungle of weird and ugly plants over the years of neglect and it needed to be taken care of pronto. One of the things that made me dread doing the yard work was the trees. There are these trees in my back yard that seem to grow like bamboo and are a pain in the ass to take down. I had 5 or 6 of them in the patch of jungle wilderness that we cut down and when it came time to take out the stumps I noticed that all of the roots seemed to be connected together like it was some sort of uber tree monster. Well the monster must be slain so away we hacked at the stumps and roots until the heart of the monster was taken out of the ground. About 3 weeks later when my lawn was starting to overtake my ankles and trip me on my way to my car, I decided to mow my lawn and wouldn’t know it? I got to the back and those trees had started to grow back! What part of hell did these trees come from? I went over to them and yanked them right out of the ground since they were so small but I knew then that this would be a battle I would have to face every week till the day I sold the house. Sigh… one more project for the list.

While the weeding and lawn mowing was in full swing, my parents surprised me with some good news. I would be getting new siding this year!!! Not only would I be getting new siding, but my parents told me that I would be getting a new back porch, new upstairs windows, and insulation!!! WOO HOO!!! This meant that I might be able to have some heat in my house this winter without breaking the bank!

So my dad called a guy he knew and we got a quote for the siding and the back porch. It sounded like a lot to me but I guess my dad thought it was a good price for all the labor so we went ahead with it. The day came when construction would begin and they started in full force. I don’t know if this is a compliment to their skill or the shoddy construction of my back porch but they had that thing torn down inside of 20 min. I can see it now. The construction crew looking at the back porch and analyzing it for a few min, making a decision on how to go about taking it down, making a few taps with the hammer and BAM! The whole porch just falls over into a heap at their feet. Well about an hour into the project, the supervisor comes inside and asks me to call my dad out to the house to take a look at something. Sigh… I knew it. Something else was wrong with the house and now it was going to cost me twice as much and take twice as long. Well my dad came out and I went out with him to find out what was going on and to make it seem like I cared. Well in another moment of laziness by the previous owners, they had another layer of siding under the old stuff. Son of a bitch. This really WAS going to take twice as long and cost twice as much! So my dad gave the go ahead and they continued taking down the old siding.

Two days later the supervisor came in again and asked me to call my dad. He came over and once again we ran into another snag. The front porch which we thought was ok was actually sinking and pulling away from the house just like the back porch. I gave another sigh and walked back inside to start drinking. In my drunken stupor I had visions of the construction crew moving into my house because it they were working on my house so long that they somehow gained part ownership of my moneypit.