Remodeling Our Hut Part 10: When It Rains It Pours

 Wouldn't you know that as soon as we had the garage off the foundation and perched up on blocks with mere straps tied off to ground stakes, that we would have severe thunderstorms?  The first week we had high winds and a power outage, which for us, only lasted mere hours.  For those in nearby cities, the power was out for days.  

We had  gone back to the Hobbit House for supper when Joel called, "Did you see the radar?  Do you have the garage tied down?"

We skedaddled back over to our house and with the skies darkening and thunder growling, barely managed to get the last of the tie-downs in place before the full brunt of the violent storm hit.  We made it back to the underground house just in time.  As we sat and watched the storm rage, we both figured the garage would be history.

The entire garage moving part of the project was iffy from the get-go.  We debated moving the garage off to another part of the yard and building a new one to match the roof pitches of the house, but the cost was a deciding factor for both of us.  If we were to build a new garage, the estimate was $20,000.  If we hired professional house movers to come in, it would cost approximately $3600.  If we did it ourselves, it would cost a lot of anxiety and sweat equity.

We had moved our little storage shed several times over the years, but hadn't ever moved a building of this size before.  But what the heck?  If it folds up, tips over or falls apart, then we'll build a new garage.  And we were lucky, the building moved very nicely off the foundation.  High winds weren't bargained for, though.  

After the storm, Joel drove down to look at the garage and sent us a text with a picture of everything the way we'd left it.  We were very lucky.  But then the power went out.  We had two sump pumps now working overtime and with no power, things would soon be a huge mess in the basement.  We had a generator but Carl wasn't keen on firing it up if he didn't have to, so we drove over to our house and sat and waited to see what would happen with the water levels.

Carl fell asleep sitting in the basement stairwell, he'd worked all day and by now it was approaching midnight.  I was tired as well, but there was no place to sit in our house that wasn't infested with mosquitoes as doors had been removed, so I adjourned to the Buick to wait.  Try as I might, I couldn't get comfortable in the car and it was stuffy inside.  I couldn't open a window or the mosquitoes would soon drain me dry, so I sat dozing in the muggy darkness with my feet on the dash and my head half in the backseat.  The seat reclines in the sedan, but I had the backseat piled with stuff from moving out so there was no way that was going to happen.  Finally around 1AM, the power came back on at the neighbor's down the road and hallelujah, ours did, too.  We went home after making sure everything was going to stay running.

We slept in late Saturday morning thinking we'd dodged a bullet the night before, only to hear severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings on TV.  Another storm front was heading in, worse than the one the night before.  Once again we wondered how the garage would hang in there, but luckily, it did.  We lost a few of our big white pine trees and many branches, but the garage stayed put.

When we drove in the driveway, once again, everything was the way we'd left it.  Wetter by far, but still there.

The excavation had been done on Monday, July 15, but the concrete wall crew was delayed for a few days.  While we were waiting for walls to be poured for the garage and addition, our two man construction crew was hard at work demolishing the upstairs.

 Follow me across the gang plank, if you dare.  With all the rain we've had, we could have easily installed a moat and a drawbridge.

 Bob (one of the contractors) had done a great job cleaning up after the first day's demolition.  Above is the view from the old dining room into the kitchen.  Below is the view of the wall that was removed between the kitchen and the little office.  The window on the left was the office, on the right, the kitchen.

 The view from the kitchen to the dining room.  (Poor old stove keeps getting shoved around.)

 Downstairs bathroom.

 Living room.  

The one thing I kept harping on to the contractors was how I wanted to protect the hardwood floor in the living room.  Ann saved boxes from her work and we put down a protective plastic covering and then covered that with cardboard boxes taped down to hopefully keep the plaster and debris from getting underneath.  The floor should be safe.  (Yeah, right.  Wishful thinking.....)

The 41 year old carpeting was ripped off the stairs, gone at last. 

 Let's go up those stairs and see what happened, shall we?

Stairway to, well, not heaven, that's for sure.  Look, there's a skylight.  No, just the opening where the chimney once was.  And as it turns out, it was also a great place for rain to run through, too.  Lots of it.

 Approaching the second story, things are pretty different up here, too.

 Bob had gutted the upstairs in one day.  Amazing how fast things can be destroyed, isn't it?  In the picture above, the black pipe was for the upstairs bathroom.  The orange square of flooring you see was the bathroom footprint.  Now imagine a toilet and a sink/vanity on the far wall.  Being a story and a half house, the ceilings were extremely slanted, so if you sat on the toilet and leaned too far forward, you hit your head on the wall.  If you washed your hands in the sink and moved too far to the right, you hit your head on the ceiling.  It was nice having a bathroom upstairs between the two bedrooms, but it was far from a 'nice' bathroom.  I don't miss it.

My old storage room.

  
Our house was a three bedroom, 1 1/2 bath.  Two of the bedrooms are upstairs, one on the west and one on the east side of the house.  

 The west bedroom from the upstairs hallway.  To the right was the old bathroom, to the left was a small storage closet and the eaves under the roof.  It was always hot and dark upstairs as the only windows were to the east and west.

 Very dark, indeed.

After a full day's worth of demolition, Phil and Bob left for the day.  Carl came home from work and patched the hole in the roof where the chimney used to be with some leftover tin and I put a bunch of five gallon pails underneath.  Good thing we did, because we had another whopper of a thunderstorm again that night and the buckets were half full.  Water still made it's way down to the kitchen below, though. 

 I took a break at noon to sit on the gazebo and try to see the house over the dirt piles.  The one thing that amazed me was how Charlie worked around all of my flowers, not even one marigold or petunia was destroyed with all the heavy equipment and dirt.  He told me later that he'd never had to work around so many obstacles with so little space to put soil.  We had loads of topsoil hauled to Joel and Abby's house as we'd run out of room in our yard to put them all. 

Another workday had come to a close.  After every contractor, electrician, excavator, plumber and whomever else is involved left for the day, Carl and I looked at each other in the wreckage of our house and asked, "Was this a good idea?"

To tell you the truth, we're still asking that question.  

"It will be nice when it's done," people say.  

Let's hope so.  It's October now.  

And it's far from done.