![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Today, in just two hours, Elmer and I cleaned the basement. This is part of the endless quest to keep my house from falling down, of which more shortly, but what interested me was how much more quickly it went than it would have if Bill and I had tried to do it together. We'd have had to stop and discuss every disintegrating box of moldy papers. As it was, he just said, "Throw it all away." And we did. Feels so good. There's an enormous pile out on the street, though.
My house is a little more than 80 years old, and in pretty good shape as old houses around here go. We've both always lived in old houses and accept a good bit of deviance from the absolutely level floors, 90 degree angled door jams, etc, that you'd want in a perfect new house. But after putting a new tile floor on the utility room (originally a screen porch, I suspect) we noticed the floor in the kitchen next to it was sloping even more than usual. So we asked the termite guy to take a look, and he found that some previous owner, installing heat ducts, had torn away part of the bricks between the foundation and upper walls, leaving several floor joists unsupported for quite some distance. And we also noticed that the bottom four steps of the flight down to the basement were rotten.
So first a carpenter to make new steps. Then a foundation guy, who said he thought we could probably fix it with a jack or at most one pillar, but only a structural engineer could tell us for sure. Since there were a couple of other odd wall removals, etc., we decided to spring for the inspection, but while waiting, I decided to clean up the ten or twelve years of accumulated junk, some from my mother's attic, mostly empty boxes, etc. But did unearth an 8 mm projector and screen from the 1960's--it it still worked, we could look at that box full of movies from my parent's drives through Mexico. Also an iron bed, covered with rust, alas.
But lots of mold! Already took one shower, wish I could wash out the inside of my head.
My house is a little more than 80 years old, and in pretty good shape as old houses around here go. We've both always lived in old houses and accept a good bit of deviance from the absolutely level floors, 90 degree angled door jams, etc, that you'd want in a perfect new house. But after putting a new tile floor on the utility room (originally a screen porch, I suspect) we noticed the floor in the kitchen next to it was sloping even more than usual. So we asked the termite guy to take a look, and he found that some previous owner, installing heat ducts, had torn away part of the bricks between the foundation and upper walls, leaving several floor joists unsupported for quite some distance. And we also noticed that the bottom four steps of the flight down to the basement were rotten.
So first a carpenter to make new steps. Then a foundation guy, who said he thought we could probably fix it with a jack or at most one pillar, but only a structural engineer could tell us for sure. Since there were a couple of other odd wall removals, etc., we decided to spring for the inspection, but while waiting, I decided to clean up the ten or twelve years of accumulated junk, some from my mother's attic, mostly empty boxes, etc. But did unearth an 8 mm projector and screen from the 1960's--it it still worked, we could look at that box full of movies from my parent's drives through Mexico. Also an iron bed, covered with rust, alas.
But lots of mold! Already took one shower, wish I could wash out the inside of my head.
Tags: