Always expect the unexpected

I’ve been avoiding writing this post because I needed several days to digest and process my thoughts. I still don’t think I can accurately communicate the gravity of the situation we’re faced with currently but I'll do my best.

The title of this post is advice that we should have taken to heart when we began this kitchen/mudroom renovation. We’ve been down this road before and we know that plans can change in an instant when you're dealing with an old house. When we bought the house, we had started out thinking that we could do the work ourselves, stripping wallpaper and making upgrades. Once we got in and realized how time-intensive it would be and how damaged the walls really were, we hired professionals to come in and replace the walls and ceilings entirely throughout the house. It altered all of our plans and became a more extensive renovation than we had anticipated.

So when we began this next renovation phase, removing part of the house, expanding the kitchen, etc., we should have kept that experience in mind. We should have known to expect the unexpected. Because you never know what you’re going to encounter when you start digging into things. But we didn’t remember. And we were blindsided by what we are now faced with.

When our contractor began this project earlier this week,  his crew pulled down the mudroom the first day. As they began removing the structure and pulling down the siding, he encountered an enormous problem. A huge, devastating problem.

Our house is rotting.

Years of poor drainage and hidden water damage have caused the support beams in the back of the house to deteriorate. The wood is literally crumbling to dust.

The sill, which is a thick beam that the entire house rests on, is rotting away.

Here is a closer view of the vertical beam that supports the right corner of the house:

We were told our house could collapse. That it is unsafe and could literally fall down around us. We will need to remove the entire back of the house and replace everything. The house will be jacked up several inches so that the sill can be removed and replaced. Our contractor, who has been doing this for years and years, told us that it is the worst he has ever seen.

You can see more of the damage here, where the siding was removed beneath the rear window:

We don't know for sure how far across the back of the house the damage spreads, or how high up to the second floor it goes either. But given that the patio extends the full length of the house, we are all assuming that everything is going to need to be replaced from end to end.

Once we heard the extent of the damage, we instantly began looking into legal action. After speaking with lawyers, we found out that unless we could somehow prove that the previous owners knew of the problem, there was nothing that could be done. Proving that they sold the house to us knowing of the problem is near impossible. The original owner is dead and the owner’s family, who sold the house to us, did not live there.

The damage is not visible from the basement. Hell, our basement looks great! The outside of the house does not show the damage either. It was not until the siding was removed that the problem was able to be seen.

The source of the problem is the concrete patio. It was never properly graded, so water has been pooling against the house and getting trapped for years. And since it happened over a long period of time, our homeowners insurance won't cover any of it. Basically, we're royally screwed.

I feel simultaneously devastated, overwhelmed, angry, relieved, and hopeful. I know that's a lot of things to feel at once, so I'll explain. Devastated, obviously, because of the shock that something that we've put so much time and energy into is crumbling. Overwhelmed thinking of the cost (time, money, sanity) that is going to go into fixing this problem. Angry because I feel like we've been duped. Relieved because this problem was caught before our house came tumbling down. And hopeful because the one good about this whole situation is that it will give us the opportunity to make this house into the house we really want it to be.

See, since we’ll have to remove and rebuild the entire back of the house, jacking the house up to replace the bottom sill and replacing all of the supports, we have kind of a golden opportunity here. With the house opened up—and it’s not going to be opened up like this ever again—we can build outward and expand the square footage of the entire downstairs. We started making a wish list of things we’ve wished this house had, and we created a floor plan.

So that is the completely new direction that we're going in. We will expand the house backwards an additional 12 feet. The rooms in the above plan that are highlighted in yellow are new.

We will create an additional bonus/music/sitting room off of the end of the living room. We’ll have an 8 or 9-foot wide opening so the two rooms will be connected and open but still separated. This way we won’t have a 40-foot long living room. In this new bonus room we’ll install a gas fireplace (I’ve often discussed our sad lack of one in this house) and French doors to the backyard. Outside of these doors is where our new patio will eventually be built (a project we’ll likely tackle ourselves down the road).

The bonus room will be connected to a tiled mudroom, where we’ll install a coat closet (something we don’t have in the house either). It will be a great place to put Lucy’s dishes (she spills an insane amount of water on the floor when she drinks) so they will be out the way. Plus the tile will make her puddles easy to clean. This mudroom will have another door out to the backyard. There will be a covered walkway leading to this back door, so water will run off and completely away from the house.
Off of the mudroom, in the back of the house, will be a bathroom. With the expanded size, we’ll be able to install hookups for our washer and dryer and won’t need to have them in the basement. We’ll have room just for a sink, toilet, and the laundry, which will hopefully (size permitting) be behind closet doors.

Straight ahead from the mudroom will be the kitchen. This is the only part that we’re iffy on. It turns out that the existing rear wall supports too much weight from the upstairs to be moved. So we won't be able to remove much of it. Because it won't have a door in the middle any longer, though, we'll be able to extend the cabinets all along this wall, which will give us lots of prep and storage space. We may be able to fit a small breakfast bar/eat-in area as well.

The entire backyard is also going to be leveled and properly graded to ensure that no water gets trapped up against the house anywhere. Some tubes will be installed underground to help drain the water as well.

Our contractor estimates that construction will be finished by the end of October. They’ll build the addition first and then break down the exterior walls, so we won’t be left with gaping holes in the house.

We are forging ahead with this new plan on Tuesday.  It's going to be an incredibly difficult couple of months ahead, financially and emotionally. While it will be tight, I am so unbelievably thankful that we have family support to help us through it. You never know what you're going to encounter, but I'm getting a little more excited about what may lay ahead for us.

A winter casualty

Last night, we had snuggled onto the couch after dinner to watch an episode of the amazingly hilarious An Idiot Abroad (seriously, if you haven't watched it, do it. Karl Pilkington is the funniest, most genius man on the planet... you'll thank me.) Well, only a few minutes into the show we heard the most ginormous crash outside. Branden and I turned to each other and knew exactly what it was before we even went to the window to look.

Like much of the northeast, we've had crazyyy ice dams on our roof the last week or so which resulted in two leaking windows. Nothing major, but we called a few companies yesterday to get estimates on what it would cost to have someone come and clear the ice and snow from our roof. Well, that won't be necessary now.

The gigantic crash was about 1,000 pounds of ice sliding off of the roof at once and plummeting down to the patio in the backyard.



Those are just some of the blocks. For some reference, that folding table in the back is 6 feet long. They're ridiculously heavy and huge. Branden struggled to move them with a shovel.

While we are so grateful that no one was outside when it happened, especially Lucy (who has taken to laying down under the roof's edge to eat fallen icicles), our glass patio table was not so lucky.

You can hardly see it, but the table has been smashed into a zillion tiny shards of glass, mixed in with the snow and ice:



This spurred an emergency trip to (where else?) Home Depot. We couldn't risk Lucy walking around in there and stepping in glass, so we had to section it off quick.

We picked up some stakes, traffic cones, and temporary fencing. At the checkout, the clerk asked us if we were buying supplies for an elaborate prank. I wish!

So here's the hazard zone that our backyard is now:





It ain't pretty. We had to use cones there because we wouldn't be able to get the stakes through the concrete patio underneath. Lesson learned: nothing is being stored against the house next winter.

The absolute worst part is that it'll have to stay like this until the 3-4 FEET of snow melts and we're able to clean up the glass. At least we'll get to shop for a new patio set in a couple of months. :)

Dear Spring,
Any time you want to arrive I know of some folks here in NH who would greatly appreciate it.
Sincerely,
Lucy's House

Ohhhh no we didn't.

I meant to update this earlier, but after we closed on June 1 we got right to work on the house and have been swamped since. Let me make this very clear: stripping wallpaper is the absolute worst, most tedious, and terrifying thing ever.

Here is the living room (and the big pup!) before we started working:

And here is the living room after about 10 to 15 hours of stripping back SEVEN layers of wallpaper:

It looks like a war zone. Remember those horrible, heart-wrenching photos of the insides of destroyed houses in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? Yup. That's what our house looks like to me.

Stripping 100 years of wallpaper (many layers of which have been adhered with actual glue that doesn't come off with those removal chemicals) is not an easy feat, as you can probably imagine. We have learned some tricks, though, that have made it a teeeeny bit easier. Allow me to share, should anyone reading this ever find themselves in the same horrible situation:

1. Get a wallpaper steamer.
We started by renting one at Taylor Rental for $28 a day. We weren't sure if it would be worth it or not, so we figured we'd rent one first and try it out. It definitely helps, and the steam penetrates most of the layers to allow for scraping. We decided to buy our own, for just under $100 at Lowes, since EVERY SINGLE ROOM in our house has 100 years of wallpaper to remove, and spending nearly 30 bucks a day just didn't make economical sense.
The steamer we got was the Wagner 905 Power Steamer. It's the little yellow vacuum-looking thingy in the second picture above. It doesn't hold as much water as the one we rented, but it still does the job.

2. Vinegar actually works.
Spraying a mixture of water and vinegar on the walls has been the most effective "chemical" treatment we've found so far. We tried DIP, that didn't work. The vinegar does smell strong, so you'll want to keep windows open. Also, if you have a dog that's anything like Lucy and will eat everything in sight, you should keep them away. Lucy licked the vinegar off the walls. Gross. Use a wallpaper scorer to puncture the paper (it likely won't penetrate all 60 million layers of paper that seem to be on your wall, but it will get through the first few) and spray the vinegar mix. Let it sit for a minute, then hit it with the steamer. Scrape the layers off with the putty knife.

If you're as lucky as we are, right about now in the process you'll discover that underneath layer #3, there is a thin layer of plaster from when some previous owner decided to plaster over the walls and then apply more wallpaper in an effort to patch problem areas. This will enrage you but it is important to not burn your new house down just yet. Instead, pick away at the plaster layer with your putty knife, and keep scraping.

Once all the paper is off completely (at this rate, we have no idea when that will be) we'll need to skim coat the entire walls, floor to ceiling, with a thin layer of plaster. There are a ton of cracks, crevices, and other imperfections in the drywall from being so old. We'll need to skim coat the walls to smooth them out (at least one coat, maybe two), sand the plaster down, and then prime and paint.

Our goal is to have the living room primed by the time we move in next Sunday. I honestly don't see how it's going to happen. We'll be there all day tomorrow (our brand new appliances are being delivered tomorrow morning!!) so hopefully we can bust out a ton of this shit and get closer to it looking like a real room and not a disaster area!

The amount of (seemingly) endless work ahead of us is kind of a depressing thought, sooo I'm going to end this post on a happier note: