The pit of despair

by

We bought the house on Caroline knowing full well it came with it's share of problems. Some were obvious like the cesspool of a  pool, and some were not so obvious until we started to pull things apart.

Day of close/ Caroline


The floor in the living room was past-it's-prime beige wall-to-wall carpeting. I despise carpeting in general, but this was especially horrid. It was one of the first things to go. Once the carpeting was 86'd we noticed a slight dip in the floor. Nothing too serious, but the floor would need to be leveled before we could put any new flooring in.Worrying about this took a back burner to adding a new bathroom in the airplane hanger, fixing the gate on the Garden Ave house for the tenants, completing the kids living room under the stairs, and having a new baby (to name a few). We lived with the plywood subloor for a while with this room functioning as a catch-all for junk, an indoor soccer court, and a beanbag nap center


We finally got around to opening things up, this weekend, and boy did we open things up. Besides the layer of carpet and underlayment, there was a plywood subfloor, then a layer of tar paper, under which was a layer of linoleum tiles, and then under that was another layer of plywood subfloor, under alllllllll of that was finally the support beams and then just dirt. I didn't know what I expected, but I was a little surprised to see just plain dirt underneath it all. After all that I was hoping to find the buried treasure (or ex wife) of a past owner, maybe a priceless dinosaur bone or two, no such luck, but there were a few empty beers, a can of spam, and, inexplicably, someone's front fender. Also, we found the culprit of the uneven floor: a decrepit center beam which on closer inspection was inhabited by a hungry termite family which had been working it's way through the beam for some time. We apologized for ruining their weekend, but they just had to go.



We had hoped it would be a problem that could be fixed quickly and cheaply, but it was evident that the entire floor needed to be ripped out down to bare earth and rebuilt from scratch.

To add insult to injury, it soon started to rain. Not a gentle Florida sunshower, but a typhoid fever type moonsoon. This ended up being a good thing because apparently our living room, unbenownst to us, became the River Jordan in heavy rains. Water was literally pouring in from a corner of the house and pooling in the center. At this point, I thought our best option would be to get a few bags of sand and make an indoor beach volleyball court so as not to fight and uphill battle. Mike, as always, Mr.Practical, poo-poo'd that idea. 


It was good that we caught the problem and were able to seal up the gaping hole, otherwise we'd soon be dealing with more wood rot and decay.

There is, as yet, no "after" photo because our living room (or as I am fondly calling it, "the pit of despair") still looks like this. Mike has been working on putting everything back together all week, and tommorrow we should at least get back to the plywood subfloor so we can play soccer in our living room again.


Leave a Reply