Monday Musings
This is going to be short and sweet because it’s been a looooooong weekend and Chris and I are both absolutely drained.
I knew it was coming and it’s here. I have hit the point of being physically, mentally, and emotionally overwhelmed. I think the tipping point for me is that the interior of the house is now in shambles. The downstairs bathroom is gutted. There’s stuff everywhere. The upstairs is chaos. More stuff everywhere.
The painters start tomorrow so we’re trying to get the interior ready. They’ll start outside, but they will be inside on rainy days and since it looks like rain on Tuesday, we’ve got to be ready. So we have started REALLY going through stuff and throwing things out. Most of the upstairs is now in boxes and trash bags and random piles for donating or garbage. So anywhere you currently look in this house, all you see is piles of shit. It’s terrifying.
So here are the updates:
All of the clean-up and repair work on the HVAC unit from post-foundation work has been done. Another $1000 we weren’t budgeting for, but honestly, $1000 feels pretty cheap to me at this point. And that is a very bad sign.
The carpenter is making awesome progress on walling up that door. He and a partner worked all day on Saturday and most of the day Sunday, until a huge thunderstorm hit. We were working inside and had assumed they left when the rain came (it was POURING), but about 30 mins later we realized they were still working. In the pouring rain. I wish we had found this carpenter 10 years ago because he’s great. He’ll be back tomorrow morning and is getting pretty close to finishing up.
Bathroom floor was removed on Friday. We discovered that the subfloor and the joists around the toilet had COMPLETELY rotted away due to a leak. It’s probably been leaking for years, and the only thing supporting the toilet was the septic line.
We started making repairs on Saturday. Chris added sister joists to reinforce the damaged floor joists, and then we started laying new subfloor. We also decided to lay a 2nd layer of subfloor because of the height difference between the old tile and the new tile (new tile is a tiny fraction of what the old tile was).
But as we started laying the new subfloor, we quickly realized that the septic line from the toilet has sunk, probably because the floor around it had rotted away. So it wasn’t high enough for us to try to get the 2 layers of subfloor plus the tile under it. We’ve put in a request for a plumber who can hopefully come out tomorrow or Tuesday and extend the septic line up another inch or 2.
Currently:
Doing nothing but all of the above.
More soon. For now, back to my never-ending lists of things we have to get done by 4pm yesterday.