Construction Advice

For those who ask me whether they should take on a construction project, i can sum up my advice with the above cartoon and this clip from In the Loop (which, if you haven't seen it, you should, and fyi a "hod" is used to carry bricks and mortar - see one here):

What Happened Next

I have left you all hanging in suspense for weeks as to what happened next (I have heard the hue and cry for more, I just ignored it). But stringing you along for weeks on end with no news or developments is designed to help you truly feel a part of this story, to get closer/climb into our 1800 ft2 world - a sort of scratch n' sniff version of our pain - for this is life with a home under construction, especially if your contractor is a worthless git.

Anyway, when last we parted, there was a tree on our addition and no roof, and the drought had come to an end. The above is what happened pretty much the day after the tree fell, the day after that, and the next several weeks after that. This is a picture of the basement level of the addition, about a day or two post rainfall, the frothy, putrid water artistically captured rippling in the light from the newly-installed windows...the Wet-Dry Vac backlit like a superhero coming to save the day. Can't you just smell the dank, rank liquid that ran down the walls of our unroofed structure, that seeped in (all for wont of a functioning drain tile) from the muck atop which we had built our simple 600 ft2 dream of a Room With a View (of the alley) and a fireplace for me, and a Room Of One's Own for my husband (a cat-free space for musical merriment)? Sure the foundation wasn't perfect, but we already had a whole functioning (and bone-dry) 50 year-old house on the same stuff and were only digging down an extra foot for this addition of modest proportion...surely the 18 feet behind the house were as stable and arid as the 35 feet presently occupied, right?

On a More Positive Note (It's Not Always Bad News)

Undeterred by the water problems, our valiant friendly worker bees (not the contractor) and I continued working on the addition once the tree was removed 10 days after its arrival. The next project was installation of the Wall of Glass. A favorite feature of mine, the plans called for 2/3 of the back wall of the house to be glass. This Wall of Glass consists of two massive window assemblies, each made up of several windows held together with some heavy duty staples and then installed as one piece into the opening. To be fair, the window installation is a story unto itself, but I sadly failed to photograph this adventurous phase of work. The sum process of installation involved stapling a few hundred pounds of windows together into an 8x4 or 8x9 ft block, then carefully (with many obscenities and much fear) lifting the 5 inch deep assembly and yourselves onto a 12" wide board straddling two manual pump jacks attached to the back of the house, each person clinging with one hand to the window assembly and with the other to the poles on which the jacks were mounted and stomping repeatedly on the jack to elevate the assembly to the appropriate height while blowing around in the wind, and finally cajoling the assembly into the opening, all the while praying to the gods that you don't die beneath some really expensive windows in the process. Here is a photo of the top half of the windows, taken from the inside. To give you a sense of scale, the window assembly is about 8 feet across and 9 feet high. You'll see a picture of the whole assembly further down. But this was not just a good thing, it was a great thing, for the installation of the windows was the first time that we started to see the potential beauty of this project being realized.


Meanwhile...
It took our and the neighbors' insurance companies about two weeks to fight it out and decide who to pay to remove the tree from our house, during which time it rained torrentially every day. Two weeks of rain without a roof or the ubiquitous Tyvek waterproofing membrane meant that the brand new framing and exterior sheathing of our little addition became totally soaked. Rain would also run down the unsealed gap between the old and new structures into the basement and pool up. The basement, as I mentioned before, was designed to have a drain tile underneath it to carry whatever rainwater that might build up below the slab off to the alley, however SS IC didn't install it per the design (more on that later), nor did he actually run the drain tile he incorrectly installed out to the alley for it to empty - he just ran a drain pipe around the perimeter of the house that went nowhere, and to compound it all, he never backfilled the trench containing the drain tile, so we essentially had a giant, undrained hole in which our vulnerable little addition sat, like an unhappy baby in a dirty diaper. After every rain came an icky little basement flood.

The Draining Process for these little deluges consisted of:

(1) Climb down the ladder using your choice between the Larry, Moe, & Curly setup on the left or the steep but limited liability (assuming the door glass didn't break with the fall) option on the right; alternatively, walk around to back of house and traverse the mudpit to get to door (bottom, notice also the gorgeous full window assembly).




(2)Using a tiny, woefully inadequate submersible pump, connected to a hose that is then run through the round hole in the back door where the door handle is supposed to go, pump the water in dribs and drabs into the alleyway;


(3) Run that 1/4 hp motor full blast for about an hour until concrete floor is merely slimy and not actually covered with water;
(4) Go to work late again;
(5) Wash, rinse, repeat.

This rain = flood = smell = draining process repeated itself pretty much twice or thrice a week for the next few months. Even after the roof and Tyvek went on and the windows went in, although the walls stopped getting soaked, the basement still took on water with every major rain, which was often.

As a result of all this chaos, a couple of more shocking developments occurred, one of which I'll share now as your reward for waiting so long for this post. Also, this first turn of events happened a month after the tree fell - essentially the same amount of time since we last met up. We discovered this pervasive development a week or so after the roofing and Tyvek wrap went up. We thought the walls had dried out...but we were wrong. I think these images pretty much say enough - you can have fun imagining how you would react to this surprise.

How It Came to This

This is a sign, right? If you walked out and saw this, you'd run screaming, right?

Unfortunately, it came too late. We were already in for a pound. About 40,000 of them. So I just stood in the alleyway and laughed until I nearly wet myself.

Not knowing where to start this story, I figured I'd go Tarrantino-style and start in the middle. Then I'll just go past and present as I see fit.

What you are seeing is about Month 9 of The Addition, depending on whether you count the 6 month delay in even starting the project as part of the timeline (I did not). After watching ducks paddle around in the giant hole this went into for a couple of months, SS Incompetent Contractor set sail pouring concrete and building walls (without first putting in the drain tile, but we'll save that for another edition) around May. The walls were framed (by non-SS IC people, including myself) in September. The roofer was scheduled to come the next day, when, on a balmy, clear, and windless night the neighbor's beyond-dead rotting 70 foot maple tree split in half and landed on our day-old framing job with such terrifying force that I thought it was The End.

And about an hour after the tree fell, the drought broke and it rained on our freshly-framed and sheathed addition for two weeks straight with no roof because the neighbor's insurance wouldn't pay to remove the tree. But I am jumping ahead.

This is some funny shit. You know why? Because we had spent months trying to get Dominion Power to move the *&@# power line underground. And we had offered to bury our neighbors' lines as well, but they refused (because if it later needed to be fixed they'd never find it!), which caused this process to drag on even longer. They ignored my list of advantages regarding a buried line, like not losing power during a storm (as we had during Hurricane Isabel). So, after four months of fighting with Dominion, they finally buried our line and moved the neighbors' line over a week earlier. And the falling silver maple took with it the neighbors' power lines. Ours, of course, was safely underground. And so, upon seeing this incredible display of karmic retribution/ridiculous irony for them and continued streak of bad luck for us, I craughed. That's right - I cried and laughed til it hurt.

The silver lining for us was that the tree also took down the Verizon line we had also been fighting to bury for months without success, and they came a few days later and finally did their work, and miraculously, our spectacularly-built framing incurred only a slight dent in the parapet wall from the tree. (Posting about the rain damage TBA.) Sadly for our neighbors and invisible to the eye upon initial viewing, their power line was snapped so hard it actually pulled the power from their circa-1940 (and therefore irreparable) main circuit box, leaving them without power for about 5 days until it was replaced. I truly don't relish the financial suffering and discomfort they incurred from this event, as this generates bad karma. But i still think that the whole scene would have won for Best Comedy in Home Construction.