December 16, 2011

In my past posts I sounded so confident, but we’ve had the house less than 24 hours and already things are starting to slip out of control.  Here is a video of the house so you can get an idea of what I’m facing.

So the first thing that happened was when then copper thieves stole the copper from the electrical panel the damaged the electrical panel.  I knew about that so it wasn’t that big of a deal, what was a big deal was that the lines from the meter box to the new lugs were too short.  We spent most of the day yesterday trying to sort that out.  Luckily, the answer came to Mark when he couldn’t sleep last night.  We added some lug splices and a few feet of 3/0 wire and we’re good to go.

Today, I cleaned the gutters.  This is kind of like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, because we know the roof is bad, but we got a lot of rain last night and I figured I could see how the water was running.  Bad news all but one of the gutters are pitched the wrong way so the water doesn’t run towards the downspouts.  We will need to rehang the gutters and 2 or 3 more downspouts.

The biggest blow of the day was when we were staring at the ceiling in the Alice in Wonderland bedroom (once we get some light on in the place I’ll post some pictures so you can see for yourself why it’s the Alice bedroom) we noticed that the ceiling joists aren’t actually resting on the bearing walls in the center of the house.  It’s like the center of the house has sunk.  Not good.  That’s a much trickier fix that reinforcing the exterior of the foundation.  Not much we can do about it now, we’ll meet with the foundation contractor on Monday and see what he recommends.

We did make some progress today.  We cleaned the gutters, took down the basketball hoop which was acting as access into the house for the copper thieves, changed the locks and secured the house, and got the electrical panel hooked up so the power company can turn our power on.

Monday is all about demo.  We’re going to demo the master bath and the paneling on one wall in the master bedroom and take down the crown molding in the living room.  Hopefully this will give us the ability to more clearly see what’s going on with the ceiling joists.

As we get more of the house stripped down we’ll have a better idea of what we are facing and I can develop a project schedule.

I’ll keep you posted.