In January of 1992 over 29,000 bathtime toys were swept off the deck of a Chinese freighter in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The sea water rapidly eroded the packaging, leaving behind an astonishing flotilla of rubber duckies, frogs, turtles, and what I am going to guess is a basilisk/beaver/platypus. Kids love those baseaverpuses. The enterprising yellow ducks have been washing up on shorelines around the Pacific rim ever since, including stops in Australia, Chile, and Alaska. But that is only the beginning of the Trail of Duck Tears. A significant percentage of the aquatic faux-fowl made their way up through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic where they were captured in giant flows of ice. Moving about a mile a day, the children's bath toys transversed the fabled North-West passage over the course of a decade. Eventually they were released from their icy Steve Rogers-like hibernation and floated into the North Atlantic where they have continued their epic cruise past the site of the sinking of the Titanic. Most are now expected to finish their journey by being ignominously washed up on the beaches of South-West England.
So I figure if a little bath toy can travel from Shanghai to Holywell Bay, how hard can it really be to remodel house? I don't want to give the impression that this is an entirely negative experience. In fact, it is quite the opposite -- as long as I don't think about the money. What money? In fact, I don't know what money is. Here, me have shiny shell, you give me R-19 roll of Owens Corning insulation.
Certain things go wrong or are difficult which leads to hair pulling and cursing. Of course it is the problems that get written about more often than not as everyone loves to (needs to) vent and I am no different.
So, rather than regail you with our latest in faucet woes I will instead walk you through some of the latest stages of the construction. If you miss the incessant whining please let our ombudsman know by leaving a comment to that effect. We will then research who will become our ombudsman, develop a rigorous system for assigning complaints to said ombudsman, before finally searching out and slapping the first Swede I can find for inventing the word ombudsman in the first place.
Like a good blog entry a house needs a foundation, i.e. concrete walls on which to lay your walls and floors. As previously described, you start by digging trenches and then build wooden "forms" on top that will shape the walls above ground once the concrete is poured. Metal rebar is laid down in the holes and throughout these wooden forms to provide additional structural strength. Displayed are some pictures of the rear of the house with the new foundational walls, which map out where the new section of the house is being added on.
The new addition is going to be two stories with a stair going up to a loft. Here is a close-up of the walls that will be at the base of that stair. The outer wall supports the outer wall of the house, while the inner wall that juts out like a concrete peninsula will support the second floor. The stair will run up between them. I am not entirely certain what the extra metal columns that you can see in the foreground are for, but I can only assume they are related to supporting the corner where stairs meet loft.
This little trio of concrete pads will help support the floor. The foundation just runs around underneath the walls, so to avoid having too large of an expanse of floor without support there is a concrete pad every so many feet (I want to say 4 feet) on which will be mounted a 4x4 beam of wood that will go up to the bottom of the floor. I think they look a little bit like melted Sears towers. Imagine the mess if someone actually managed to melt the Sears Tower. Hmmm... Better get Homeland Security on this right away.
But the addition is not the only place we had to put down concrete foundations or pads. Let us take a walk down house memory lane... This was what our den looked like pre-apocalypse, back before we had to fight scavengers and strongmen for gasoline and the basic right to survive. Back then our house was highly compartmentalized, with every room completely walled off from every other. As part of the master plan we decided to open up the house quite a bit, with the major victim of this retructuring being the wall between kitchen and den, which you can see in this photo with a couple of doors in it.
Well it turns out that wall was a load-bearing wall, a fact that was ignored throughout most of the panning process despite repeated inquiries from yours truly as to its nature. But I said this blog would not be a complaint-fest so let us move on. The upshot of the whole load-bearing wall removal is that one must replace said wall with a new support beam or you risk having your roof collapse on top of you. The new beam will require a new post to hold it up and that beam needs a concrete footing or base. This requires cutting your floor open and digging into the ground, putting in rebar and pouring concrete. An example of such an in-floor concrete footing is shown here.
Here is what that support looks like with the beam dropped down into it. We had to do this in two places where we moved walls, although the kitchen wall is the most dramatic example. In neither case were these "predicted" alterations so in neither case had they been included in the contract. These "changes" to the plan required engineers, foundation experts, framing guys and most importantly, gobs more money... but I digress. No bitching, that's the watchword today.
Here is the new beam with all the ceiling 2x4s coming into it. The new support post that rises up from the concrete pad is on the far right next to the white wall. A similar new support is not required on the far side as there was already a foundational wall on the outer part of the house. The framework from the original dividing wall is still present -- we hadn't removed it yet as of this photo.
OK, now the wall is gone. This is a photo taken from the same angle as the pre-demolition photo. In the distance you can see a couple of framed out windows (but no actual windows yet), one of which sits where the door out of the laundry room used to be. Clearly a lot of work remains to be done, but you can already see how much more space this will create.
Now before I go, my -- approximately -- weekly twins update. The two are crawling everywhere and climbing on everything. A long time ago a friend (Jason?) gave us a single bumper car/glider/saucer. Hell, I am not sure what you call it, but it is a sling seat that you can stick a baby in where their feet can touch the floor. By standing in this sling they can actually walk a bit, with the rest of the plastic apparatus holding them upright. As they got stronger and more active we would use our "car-car" (my vocabulary is being steadily baby-ized) as a good holding area where the baby was happy and unable to extricate itself.
Unfortunately once the gruesome twosome started crawling and climbing in earnest, if you put one in the car-car the other would climb up on its side, starting a pushing and pulling war that inevitably resulted in a baby down situation: Code Thump. Our solution? Buy another baby walker of course. So now our house is starting to resemble a parking garage, but at least the girls can take on their very own demoliton derbies.
My money is on the bald kid.
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