We lost our laundry room with the demolition of the kitchen. Coincidentally, our tenant’s dryer broke the same day. We’ve been accumulating laundry for over a week.
The dryer has been fixed and whites are washing, all in time for the first heat wave of the year. We won’t have to take advantage of the offers we received to do laundry at friends’ houses. Yay!
Okay, so the story we all know has that on day 1. Billy and John didn’t have the blank canvas to start with like the more famous version of that utterance, so we’ll give them a few days slack. 
I came home after the gym to find Mark typing away (see On the Surface, below) and was eager to poke around and look for progress. The exterior light was fading, but it was clear, the drain pipe in the center of the room was gone! I looked around for the switches controlling bare bulbs we’d had the previous days, and they were gone. I turned around and flipped a switch. We have LIGHTS!
Most of our cans (or hats, or recessed lights) have power and bulbs in them now. The room finally has a sense of some progress away from demolition and towards build. The pipe was indeed gone, and more outlets had been placed around the room, including one for the stove, the fridge, and our network cable. The plumbers had run the line for the fridge’s water supply, and again, that big pipe was gone.
Our basement door doesn’t close well. We have to latch it. So i had Mark hold the door shut while I peeked downstairs. It was a little reminiscent of the King Tut discovery, but I grew up on that story, so “What do you see?” “Marvelous things!” is one of my favorite exchanges. Mark came down to look at things, but Phoebe managed to get the door open a few times. (The photo was her fourth trip in, since I wanted to film it.)
The second post hole had been filled in, and two temporary beams were in place. They’re just 2×4s, one buckling slightly with the jack underneath it. (That was that contraption we’d seen before that looked like a brass megaphone) The real lally columns are on the ground and will be put in place when the concrete has cured.
The plumbers have finished hooking up our drains, and have moved a few lines around to accommodate the new beam and remove some old brass pipes. We did find an old closet under the stairs. It had always had stuff in front of it, so I have stayed away from it. It’s a rather sizable closet, so we’ll have to figure out what we can store there.
The exterior work is all done with replacement shingles up. We’ll still have to paint, naturally.
Tomorrow: probably electrical and plumbing inspections. Those are both big steps, and will mean we can start to move forward with some other significant things, like floors and walls. We do have to get the floor level first.
Yesterday spoiled me. I was hoping to be wowed with something completely impossible, like a full set of drywall or half a floor or something else that isn’t likely for Day 3.
And? Nothing thrilling. A full day’s work, to be sure.
The hole in the floor that Phoebe explored has been filled. A hollow core door to the dining room has been put back up for the time being. I went down the basement and saw they’d abandoned and refilled one of the test holes for the lally column, but completed digging the other several feet deep. I assume this means we only need one support column.
I thought that was it, but when I went to wash my hands from the basement, *sputter* *splash* showed that plumbing has been done. An e-mail from our upstairs neighbor confirmed. I’m glad to get his inconvenience limited to fewer chunks.
I think we’re going to see a lot of progress today. At least I hope so. The electrician is hoping to finish up his stuff, including putting in a network connection so I can hook my laptop up in the kitchen. [Okay, so I really want to do a flat-panel touch screen monitor connected to a mini computer so I can hook into the net and manage recipes, shopping lists, music, etc. Mark said "That's sound like a nice idea. Just like having a pony."] Billy said he’s hoping to get the electrical inspection done by Friday, so things are moving nice and quickly.
The plumber is in today to finish his vent work, and re-route Craig’s water supply lines and drain. Most of that work has been done, and we were lucky to find an old vent in Craig’s closet so we could tie right into that without having to create a new hole in the roof.
In the basement, the guys are digging through the barely 2″ of concrete to set new footings for the lally columns, and they’ll work to put the beam in after all that’s done. I was assured that we do have a foundation thicker than 2″, but the builders probably conserved on concrete (read: were cheap) where they didn’t need it. Who put things in their basements in 1905, anyway? It does keep our wine nice and cool.
According to Billy, we might have walls and floor next week, then we wait for the cabinets to arrive. We’ll take that time to paint, I imagine.
Today’s pictures include: shingles on the outside, the old door (in the dumpster), some electrical work.
When I got home and saw the great light the new door was letting in, I was so impressed. It’s really made the change I was hoping to get: a much more open space. I peered down through the hole into the basement you may have seen in all those pictures. I saw a giant beam sitting on the floor of the basement, and a giant brass contraption that looked ancient, heavy and serious business. It might be a jack. It might be a drill. I just don’t know.
What I did see were two square holes in the floor, about a foot on a side. We’re going to put some extra support under the kitchen to help with a sag that’s developed. After 100 years, a little sag is likely. This sag is right under the wall that was in the middle of our old kitchen. It’s probably that the sag happened early in the kitchen’s life. An old, heavy sink probably sat right there in the middle of the room and pulled the wall down with it. We found old pipes running through that section of wall (hence the big hole).
I noticed the holes in the floor were showing dirt, and not at any really big depth either. Does that mean we only have a 2″ slab under our house? Would that explain why water flows in so easily when it rains? Why we’ve had a spring bubbling up when the rain is heavy? I’m sure tomorrow we’ll find out what’s up. If new lally columns are going to be installed, they’ll need to have a four foot deep footing. So we’ll know for sure how deep that slab is.