Washout!!!

Today was a total washout. Literally. It rained hard all day, so the footings didn't get dug and nothing got done. (sigh) The clouds cleared out this afternoon so hopefully, tomorrow will be a more productive day.

Something I forgot to mention in my first post was the heating and cooling situation. The central unit that I currently have on the house has been nothing but a PITA since I got the house. The unit was new, but it was installed incorrectly and it's been giving me trouble from day one. It bit the dust again a couple of weeks ago just as I was needing heat. I finally found somebody who knows what they are doing with HVAC and called them to fix it. The motor on the fan was frozen up. While they were fixing it, they found that the unit had a 60 amp breaker on it, but it was wired with a 40 amp wire. It's a wonder the house hadn't burned down. Honestly. I know the guy that installed the unit. I went to school with him. I wasn't impressed with him back then and I'm even less so now. All I can say is that its a good thing he was nowhere to be found when they told me about the wiring.

So back to the original problem. No heat. Do I throw more money at the current situation or do I do something totally different. The problem is that just fixing the motor is not going to solve the problem because the current unit is not big enough to handle the house with the new addition, so I will have to put in a new unit, new wiring and new duct work. If I've got to do all that, I decided that I would check out something different, so....... I'm checking out putting in a geothermal heating and cooling system. It would cost more up front, but the operating costs are almost non-existent and it cuts your water heating costs by about 3/4. I'm there. Anyway, I got the man from Southern Solar to come out and take the measurements and he is suppose to get me an estimate this week on how much it would cost to install.

I love the idea of the geothermal unit and eventually I want to install solar for electricity which helps enormously. The geothermal would put way less of a load on the panels. Unfortunately, the electric co-op that I'm under doesn't allow grid tie-ins so I either have to be on grid or totally off.

My little farmette is becoming the great experiment. I'll keep you posted.

The Start of It All

I'm renovating my house. Big time. And since I have so many friends scattered all over the country, instead of sending out 500 emails I decided to venture into the world of blogging to let everyone know what is going on in my world.


I retired in July and moved home from across the country. My furniture arrived on Sept 30th and it became obvious immediately that things were not going to work out as were. The orginal plan was to live in the house for a year and then do a full renovation. The idea was good and it could have been done, but......... The furniture fit but I would have been really uncomfortable for a year, so being the flexible person that I am, I made a quick executive decision that the renovation needed to be done NOW!


At first, I was thinking, maybe just a bit here and then I could take a breather and a few months later do something else. As I began to get serious about what I wanted to do to the house, I realized so many of the things were intertied that doing it in bits and pieces would just not be practical. So it was all or nothing.


I knew who I wanted to do the work, so I got in touch with him and told him I needed help. He came over and we spent a couple of hours going over the existing structure. He's great to work with. My knowledge of construction is limited at best, but I know what I want the end product to look like, so he tells me just to keep talking and sooner or later he'll see the same vision I do.


He agreed to start work on November 9, but circumstances ended up interferring with that and we actually started on the 16th.



So here's what I'm starting with:





The house is a two-bedroom, one-bath that was originally built in 1963. With the carport it's about 1,100 square feet. The kitchen is original and hasn't been updated ever and with my love of cooking that just wasn't going to work. It's also, in reality, a four room house - the two bedrooms, a living room and the kitchen. The bathroom was more a closet space even though it did contain a small bathtub, a sink and a toilet. I could literally stand in the middle and touch both opposing walls at the same time. Not to put too fine a point on it, but sitting on the toilet could become a real adventure in flexibility.


So the 16th arrived and work began. As with all building projects, destruction had to take place before construction could start. I think Builder was afraid that the mess generated would overwhelm me, but it takes a lot to panic me. I just accepted it as a fact of life and let it go.


The first to go was the small add-on room that was being used as a laundry. It had been added to the original stucture sometime in the 70s and was in pretty bad shape. It hadn't been put together all that well, and wear and tear was showing. Even if I hadn't been redoing the whole house, that would have had to go.












Next it was the concrete.....and more concrete........and more concrete..........and more concrete. What we thought was a thin floating pad that the laundry room was sitting on, turned out to be a foot thick slab with rather interesting fill items. Then when they starting digging out the addition crawl space, we ran into more concrete. Apparently, when they laid down the slab they took all leftover concrete and spread it out from the end of the carport. Over the years it had gotten covered with dirt and we had no idea it was there.......unfortunately.














So, two weeks have expired, interrupted only by a holiday and hunting season. The concrete has been busted, the crawl space has been dug, the carport roof is propped up, some of the siding is off and a good portion of sheetrock in the south end of the house has been removed.









Tomorrow it starts again. The plan is to measure off the walls and dig in the footings. I'll be posting more as it goes along.