My Dream Nightmare

The termite guy came out to see what we had done, and thought everything looked real nice. Then he told us that we just needed to dig a small ditch around the entire room for the chemicals to soak in. I almost cried. I thought the digging was done, but NO! The digging was not done! With our sore backs and bodies, we went back after it. It really didn’t take all that long, and so later that day, Benchmark Pest Control (who I highly recommend) came in and soaked our room with chemicals which have surely been found to cause all sorts of problems in people, as well as animals. Who cares? I’m a landowner now. Who has time to think about the earth???????????

Now we laugh.

Next up, prepare for Concrete. we had decided that we could have our footers dug and rebar put in place, and a frame for the front of the building all set to go by 3:30 that afternoon, which was as late as the concrete guy would agree to show up. Oh, the drama begins. One thing after the next, the levels are wrong, the footers are too wide, the inspector can’t get here. So we are freaking out like a bunch of imbeciles, and the concrete guy gives me the “‘fore I load up this truck, I wanna make sure we are all on the same page” call, and I admit, we are just totally frazzled. Somehow when it is a hunderd degrees outside and you start at 6 AM, well, hells bells. You just can’t always get it together. He was relieved, he himself being a middle aged man who didn’t fancy loading his truck up in the heat of the day and would also be glad to come back in the A.M., he wasn’t even mad. I figured he’d be irritated. No, it just made beer thirty oh so much closer.

The next day, with a fresh perspective, we were able to get all set up for the concrete, and get that concrete poured. We had ordered EXACTLY the right amount. I don’t wanna brag, but it there was none to waste. I supervised, while the concrete driver told me sordid stories about when he used to be a musician. Oh dear. And of course, it ends with the hard sell on a nice pair of amps he has….!

Feeling super legit!

Obviously once the concrete is poured, the only thing to do is watch it dry.

The next day was all about the girder. Yes, the girder. For those of you who aren’t, ahem, as versed as I in the ways of the construction industry, the girder is some insanely large stick of wood that you run down the center of a wooden floor. It was about 5 giant pieces of wood staggered and nailed together. And of course, to get the whole thing level, yes, we shimmed. Shimmity shim. That would be the name of our floor instillation business: Shim’s.

Nice line on that girder, huh?!!

Not a girdle, a GIRDER!!!

Then the ye olde vapor barrier goes down….

Kind of like a diaper for the floor.

Then the real madness began. 86 boards going across this beautiful soon to be floor. Talk about redundant. This is when you really need to bulk up on your ritalin, because if you really stopped to think about this project, you would just leave town. That is precisely the reason why Vegas is open 24 hours a day. Better than your best friend, who never answers their phone on a week like this.

Of course, every single board had to get a little trimmed off.....

We had to block the sidewalk, but I think everyone was so glad they didn’t have to do this project themselves, that they politely took the road around our little disaster and averted their eyes.

Now all we have to do is nail it in!!!

So, how do you say this? We cut the waste off the board in three, and that served as the boards that blocked in the footers. Footers? Is that the long board going across? Hmmm, or is that a header? Or a joist? Or a rafter? Or is it time to quit yet? And you are?

I thought I could make this long story short. Oh well, we worked from the front to the back.

And when we got done, we realized we forgot to stain the boards first, so we pulled it all up and threw it away.

Just kidding! It was an unbelievable improvement. The only thing is it lowered the ceiling. We had a nice tall  ceiling, and then it wasn’t so tall. The acoustics got really loud. The nail gun hurt my ears. I spaced out more, I walked around like I was doing something, although I knew my primary job was to make sure we didn’t cover the floor and leave a bunch of tools under there. Leave that to the pro tool gatherer.

A platform for tools. Above ground.

The dirt was feeling further and further away. All I could think about was the big broom I was going to buy. Wow!

We put in four trap doors, for future access. And for whatever reason, it made the kids go down under the floor.

Well, somewhere between almost done and done, we went back to North Carolina for a week and got the kids and pretended like none of this was happening. Then the hardest push was to get going again when we got home, but we pushed ourselves (rather, I pushed Zac) out the front door and down to the shop, where we got the plywood all down, and the detail work done (like going under the bathroom’s pre-exsisting walls):

Yeah, like UNDER the bathroom wall.

Notice the trap doors.

So first things first. Big empty room! Sounds like it is time to bring the roller skates over.

Roller Queen!!!

Hockey Team, anyone?

We are gonna have to start charging admission!

So that concludes the floor. The floor project as we know it, which means, attention off the ground, time to look up. Look up to the ceiling, the walls, the windows! Onward HO!

Recycling! The green way to build.

So, the kids are gonna be in North Carolina for a few weeks. Once we ruled out ‘romantic vacation to Rome’, and ‘buy a sailboat and circumnavigate the world’, well, what was left to do but go in that big room on Ouachita and dig dirt? Especially since we were experiencing one of the driest hottest summers on record! Who could resist? Year 9 of marriage almost always calls for drastic measure. The thought went like this, “I mean, how LONG could it really take to just dig out six inches of dirt? I mean, we could go rent a bunch of machinery, but really, if we just DID it, how long would it REALLY take?” Well, the answer is in. And it was 8 days. With help.

The first dig. The very first few minutes of the dig.

We had been going at it about, well about a few hours, and we were feeling the heavy weight of the beginning of a project, when our friend James Katowich dropped by. He took one look at our project, and decided that he would come back and help us out. I’m sure he felt sorry for us, I’m sure he could feel the crushing weight of the tons of dirt we would be removing, and I think his inner protestant thought the hard work would do him good. Sure enough, the next day he showed up, and spent his hours digging, hauling wheelbarrows of the clay/rock/dirt combo that is otherwise known as THE GROUND, and we all flushed out our sweat glands. Afterwards, we restored our bodies with BBQ from Mickey’s.

Fit as a fiddle, and just getting fitter.

I was hoping the generous mood of James would be contagious, and sure enough, when James was out on the street dumping a wheelbarrow full of EARTH onto the trailer, he came across Hillbilly, who was a man on the lookout for some work. Hillbilly came in the shop, and asked Zac what was up, and Zac says, “low pay, bad hours, hard work, be here at 6 A.M. if you really mean it”. I guess he figured that would take care of him, but what do you know, next morning when we pulled up at 6:11 A.M. (we were the late ones) he was there waiting for us. Ready to DIG DIRT!

The morning was kind of quiet, all of us sniffing each other out, trying to figure out if this was all gonna be ok or not, and we hauled and dug and maddocked that damn hard ground (maddocked? is that a word?) and worked like a bunch of bees in a hive. Sweating, sweating, and sweating. Trying not to fall over, me hoping Hillbilly was of sound body, because this was some crazy work….

Manifest your destiny!!!

Slowly but surely the dirt came out. We had borrowed a leveling device from Al Childs, who so generously loaned out the tool, and it saved us from digging too deep. Luckily, Zac just happens to be the kind of genius who knows how to use every kind of tool that was ever invented, because I would have just eyeballed the whole thing.

SO we dug, and we dug, and a few folks came by to help, Joe Power came over and dug a bit, dug out  the giant rock that was under the back bathroom….One wheelbarrow at a time. How do you write descriptive and interesting commentary about digging out dirt? I guess you don’t. How about some more pictures:

Not afraid of rock.

Jamie came by and dug for an afternoon. I think Hillbilly thought our friends were truly crazy. He couldn’t imagine a world where people do this kind of thing voluntarily. Maybe no one came back twice, but he kept coming back-maybe it was the money. Hmmmmm.

Jamie even brought us beer!!!!

We dug about 8 days worth, and took about 10 loads of dirt to our neighbor across the street, who is trying to build a mountain in his back yard. Extending his land, whatever it is you call it when you continue to dump dirt down a hill side till it becomes more flat surface for you to put your junk on. Arkansas Landscaping.

The Dirt Mechanics.

It just seemed so clean as we dug out the dirt. As if we were purging a layer of mess that needed to be moved. And to be perfectly honest, I was just glad we never found a body.

Diggin Footers.

We had to dig in footers for the 8 supports we would be putting in with concrete. And also a footer for the front area. Eventually, we would remodel the front window and restore the old storefront to its former glory. A recessed entry, with display windows on either side. That is in Phase 19 of this job, but it is in there.

The Final Blow. The last swing of the maddock. Wow!! That wasn't so bad, eh?

Finally, the day came. We were ready to move on from DIRT. DIRT DIRT DIRT. That was all we were saying anymore. That was what I saw at night when I closed my eyes. Suddenly, parenting two kids seemed like a cinch. Where were the kids? Was it time to leave yet????

The lowest point in the job.

The termite wall. Two guys, one day. And some help from Zac, and it goes from:

to looking like this:

Look ma, no wall!!

to ending the day with this:

What termites?! Ha! What termites!!????

Just a touch of plaster, and you’ll never even know this happened. What a cinch.

In the backyard of the Piano Shop is a beautiful brick wall, complete with arched windows and doorways, and it is a place that should be enjoyed. Part of the process of getting the water out of the building, after the main drain was complete, was getting the water from the roof and backyard to enter into our colorful drain pipe.

That took some coaxing. The gutters had fallen off the back of the building, and the brick on the back wall had taken a beating. Let us for one moment look at the building’s courtyard when we bought it.

What? Are you for real? Who would buy this building?!!

So you can see we had our work cut out for us. Thank goodness we are such visionaries! Overly optimistic! Insane!! So we cleaned it all up, and got ready to get down to brass tacks. Now I am going to put some pictures of the wall before, so you can see how great it was after. Neat. Like Minnesota neat. Check out those arches, hanging in mid air!!

That brick holds itself up!!

Middle!

to the right

February. wow, where did the time go? 8 snow days and freezing weather, that is where! And there is nothing you want to do less than go work in a freezing, poorly lit building when it is too cold to feel your fingers. Especially when you can stay home and sit by the fire.

Today was a sunny day, in the upper 60’s, so it seemed ripe to head down to the studio (as we now call it. Ouachita Studio). No plan, just ready to look at the drainage situation through the new lens of 2011. We look at the back of the building, the old drain had been completely blocked by dirt, and we had dug away the dirt to find it last year. This year, we needed to meet it on the other side of the wall, and rip out all the flooring that would be in the way. So armed with dust-masks and hammers and pry-bars, we went at it. There it is, Ok, lets move further down, ok, under the toilet that is has a top half of green ceramic and a bottom half of white ceramic, ok, under the bathroom wall, over to the part of the floor that caved in.

Why yes, that toilet IS dangling in mid-air!!!

Yes, yes, when we bought the building no one seemed to know why the back half of the middle shop was caved in. It just seemed to have happened one day. Well, today was the day I finally believed Joe Davis. It wasn’t any major act that caved the floor in, but rather the slow work of a water leak. Several water leaks. The major drainage pipe that went from the back of the building to the city sewer (not sewage, but drainage) had several large cracks in it. And some pipe was going to it that had rusted off, and several other large operator errors. But none of this would have been detected from above the floor. And what day do you really want to rip out your oak hardwood flooring to see the drain pipe? Well I’ll tell you. Februrary 14th, 2011. How romantic. I would imagine most people would be able to cut their losses on the whole “hardwood flooring” topic when they noticed the entire floor sagging and eventually coming apart 18 inches below where it is supposed to be. It seems at that point you could say that something isn’t working, and perhaps there really is a problem. No, not Joe Davis. He put strange floor bandaids all over the place, and then eventually just started throwing wood trash down into the “pit”. Lovely. Today it came out. Today we “went there”. Zac took a shovel and started to dig the pipe out, and it looks like tomorrow will be a date with the advice guy, also known as the plumber.

The original drainage pipe-is that historic??!

We had a nice lunch out back, and it was such a beautiful day to be there, it was nice to sit in that backyard, nice until you start thinking about the neighbor’s tree that is right on the retaining wall, or the retaining wall itself, or the brickwork, oh me oh my! I have to not think about anything but the drainage. We’ve got to get that water off the back of the building! Yes! We do! All future progress hinges on the building being dry. Today, though, today was the day I laid eyes on the broken pipe. There is always the hope that things aren’t really broken, that maybe if the guy with the snake could come back he could knock the little dirt out of the pipe and everything would be fine, but today we got the telegram. The pipe is broken, it is full of dirt. It cannot be repaired, and it has caused all this damage. Unreal, huh? A pipe! A faulty pipe! But that pipe allowed (and certainly aided) water to flow freely under the building, and that trapped moisture rotted and molded the floors (oh, and the roof leaks), and made a wonderful habitat for the termites to thrive in.

Really? Is this really all that happened?

And there it started. When? What day did the first leak spring? 50 years ago? 10? 35? 82? I wish there was a way to find out little life mysteries like that! What was going on in the building then? Someone selling a piano, discussing in 1963, and right under their feet, silent as the night, a little bit of water started draining out. And then more, and then some rain, and there it goes! What madness! Let us have a look at this brown, dusty, strange mess that is the messiest it can go before it gets better. Right? I am really counting on this being the nastiest point of this renovation project. Please.

Contemplating divorce.