‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plan.’ To which I say ‘if you want to make God piss her pants in hysterics, tell her your plan for fixing something in an old house.
For a couple years after moving in to the house at 33 South Road, I had no real idea what was in the barn. There was a canyon running through to the oil tanks and a little storage space on the right.
The rest of the space was packed with scrap metal, furniture, tangled bits of dead fishing gear, lumber scraps and uncategorized debris. As I began picking through the periphery, I was unaware that lurking further in were dark, obscure and extremely dense objects at the center of the galaxy.
These consisted of a half dozen steam power era woodworking tools. Not the brightly colored Ryobi, Makita or DeWalt types, but massively built planers, lathes, bandsaws and a drill press. I had no use for these things, which I believe were operated by a system of overhead belts and pulleys supplied with power at one source, perhaps a steam engine or team of oxen. I did, however, have plenty of use for the space they occupied.
Some devices could be slid, walked, crowbarred or pried out of the barn, but a couple of them required an excavator to snake its hydraulic strong-arm into the barn and lift them out.
When the floor was cleared, it was evident that even if these dense cores didn’t bend spacetime, they certainly bent the barn floor. Crushed would be more accurate. The deep divot also bounced a good bit.
The floor has been bugging me for a number of years now and I figured (which is where God starts in to chuckling) that I could just pull up the broken floorboards, splice a couple of joists in, replace the floorboards and have a beer while admiring my fine work.
The first length came up easily enough, but only revealed another layer of planking running perpendicular to the upper layer. This may seem crazy, but pulling up other floorboards showed more of the exact same planking down below.
Well. Ok. So I’ll take up some of both layers and fix the collapsed joists, right? Mmmm. Except that over here is a column on top of both layers of floor which seems to be supporting a carrying beam. And another one over here. So, if these were removed, I would a) have a lot more work just to get at the problem, and b) possibly find myself wearing the upper level of the structure.
Next is the search for a demo blade to fit my reciprocating saw, and some exploratory surgery on the worst affected area. The reveal was not encouraging.
There is often a point in any challenging project where I think of just covering everything back over and quietly walking out backwards, whistling offhandedly and finding something else to do.
What I found was that my forebears thought it was ok to just lay support beams on dirt, and that the support beams mostly didn’t exist any more.
Longer pause this time. Yup, looks the same from over on this side.
To filibuster, I started digging the dirt and rocks out and hoping the subconscious would craft me a plan. In addition to many five gallon buckets of dirt and good sized hunks of granite, there were an old drill bit, a number of bones, a vertebra section and what I believe was a horse’s tooth.
Better has to be good enough this time. Short of rebuilding the entire bottom half of the structure, the best I could come up with was to prop the new joists up on bricks and roofing shingles and jack the floor up as far as possible, then nail it all together again.
Once the new stringers were stood in place and elevated, everything else went back together in a half hour or so. I suppose to some extent I was just sewing the patient back together with a shorter term fix, but better is good enough.
The swooping contour is mostly straightened and the trampoline effect is gone. I wouldn’t want to set up a billiard table there or try to store a giant cast iron lathe, but balance has mostly been restored in the galaxy.
Showers when one is caked filthy and sore are way more satisfying than ones before an office day.
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