Easter Weekend at the Farm

Pre-Note:  Our server at work went down (as I was writing this) on Monday about 5:30 and it wasn't repaired until just before 5 on Wednesday.

Well, Guys and Dolls, I'm back after a weekend filled with groans, grunts, dust, mud and (finally) smiles of satisfaction.  OK, most of the grunting and groaning were coming from Sandy and me.  We decided that while Bob and Roger were working on the water heater issue, we would start getting some of the rooms squared away.

For those of you who may not know, Roger and I moved into the Farmhouse in September of 2007.  We moved OUT of the farmhouse in August of 2009 when we decided that the sinking water heater issue was just too dangerous to chance.  Our daughter happened to have an empty house here that was about 3/4 finished and even that sounded good.  We asked if we could move in there and finished it for them (rent free of course).  Sounded like a win-win for everyone, so we are now squatters.  However, everyone seems to be happy.  When we left the Farmhouse, we weren't very nice to it.  We just left it a mess (as my friend BjB says, "Because you could".)  It was August, it was HOT and I had moved more in the past few years than I had in my entire life.  I was DONE.

So I have a huge attack of guilt every time I go back in there.  But even with the mess outside and the mess inside, that old house still feels like home.  Anyway – I digress – I’ll get back to this weekend.

The guys had a lot of work to do.  As I suspected, when they removed the 1" pipe going to the water heater, it only had a pinhole of light showing through it.  The rest of the interior of the pipe was rock hard with what I suspect at one time was the "rust colored oozy matter".

The boys discovered that the foundation of the floors consisted of (going on memory here) 2 x 12 planks laid diagonal to the floor boards with another row of planks (2 x 6?) laid at a 90 degree angle to the floor boards.  As luck would have it, there was a knot in the bottom plank directly under the water heater (where else would one put it?).  The nature of knots is not nice.  It probably started cracking 30 years ago. Anyway, without going into too much detail (Bob's going to tell me where I went wrong describing this), they were in and out of that hole in the floor all day Saturday with drills and hammers and saws-alls trying to get to what they needed.

When they weren't in the hole in the house, they were in the hole outside playing moles and digging further under the house from the back yard to try and get closer to the plumbing in the water heater closet -- which happens to be smack dab in the middle of the house.  So after hours of drilling, sawing, digging and shoveling both inside and out, they came to a stopping place.  It was time to pour some cement.

We had poured a small slab for a new water heater outside last summer when we originally started this repair and that’s when we discovered that we couldn’t go any further with the plumbing until we could get the old one out.  That's when we also discovered there was no crawlspace big enough for a human-type mammal.  Squirrels can run amok under there, but Hunnyman couldn't get under the house far enough to get near the water heater.  So he started digging a crawl space.  Well, after days of digging (like Andy digging out of Shawshank) he finally stopped.  That's where it has been since we just packed up like the Beverly Hillbillies and moved on up the road.

So the slab that we poured last summer just needed to be bigger so we can enclose the water heater.  So that's what Handy Hunny and Builder Bob proceeded to do.  Once it was poured, the weekend was pretty much done and we said 'adios' to the old gal until next weekend.

Thanks for reading this far - and sorry it took until Wednesday to get this blog out.  I included a few pictures of our worker bees from the project.  I didn't include any of the rooms that Sandy and I groaned over because they still need a few little things and then I'll post some before and afters.

Thank you a zillion times to our most faithful sidekicks, Bob and Sandy R.  They always are so generous with their time and talent.  I do not know why we deserve friends like we have.  But I'm sure glad we do.

In closing - Roger and I walked the fields last night but didn't work on the house.  It was windy but nice.  It takes about 40 minutes to go a mile but in our conversation, we went lots farther planning what will happen with the Farm.

Hugs to all!