More and more of our house keeps dis- appearing all the time, although, if you look closely, you can now see through the floor into the basement. It could be argued that we are simply increasing accessibility. We could also say that we now have a 30-foot ceiling, which would be sort of true, but only in the cellar, which makes it less appealing. (You are also getting treated to the effects of my brand new fabulous wide-angle lens, which makes the downstairs look like it's the size of Wembley Stadium. It's not.)Although we know very little about the previous owner of the building, we can be pretty sure that his tenants referred to him as "that f***ing landlord," since there was water pooling under all the radiators until the floors buckled. Either the tenants passive-aggressively didn't tell the landlord that there were leaks or the landlord didn't pay any attention, but in any case, f***ing landlord.
When we uncovered the joists, we found that a few of them had some dry rot. I'm not sure why it's called dry rot, because it is created by soaking the timber in water and letting it stand, but whatever. A hasty reassurance to all our parents, siblings, interested parties: I'm not talking about beams that are rotted through. I'm talking about a little crumbly on the top. Our contractor looked at them and said, Yeah, these are OK. In one place, however, we were nervous enough that we decided to drop in a new beam and nail it in next to the old one. Which we did. Me and Jen. Today. We are SO BUTCH.
See? Shiny new beam sitting in the joist hanger next to the old somewhat crummy one.Another view of the beautiful new beam. Not that we're proud of ourselves or anything.
