The Great God of Chaos has been leaping around my house for two weeks!

OK.  Today’s blog posting should have appeared in the middle of the night (based on my time zone).  But it didn’t.  Here’s why:

I had a soft spot in the floor in my bedroom.  Ken came and looked at it and gave me a price, saying it was a one day job to rip up the carpet and put down a layer of plywood over the whole floor because although only a couple of places were soft, the whole floor was probably particle board.  When particle board is used for flooring, it isn’t just nailed into the joists, it is glued down.  So it is easier to leave it in place and cover it over with plywood.  Sounded good to me, so we arranged that he and Carl would come and start work two Fridays ago.  They did.

Yoga Room with No Room for Yoga!

To minimize their time on the job, I cleared all the stuff from the horizontal surfaces and moved all the small pieces of furniture to my yoga room.  I removed and stacked the dresser drawers in the yoga room as well, to make it easier to move the dressers.  I removed all the hanging clothes from the (14 foot long) closet and stacked them, still on their hangers, on the futon in the spare room.  I removed all the boxes of stuff from the closet as well.  I took down the curtains, too, as I planned to wash the windows and curtains before replacing them.

Spare Room with No Room to Spare!

Living Room with No Room to Live!

 When they came, Ken and Carl took the bedroom door off to make it easier to work.  They put that against the wall in the kitchen.  They moved the dressers and mattress into the living room.  They took the headboard off the bed frame and put it in the living room as well.  Then they put the bottom of the bed in front of the bedroom door in the kitchen, effectively blocking access to the pantry where all the dry, easy-to-eat foods like crackers and nutrition bars are stored.

As they ripped up the carpet – which was not wet – they noticed that the padding under the carpet appeared to be wet.  It turned out that the particle board under the padding was saturated from a leak in the pipe leading into the hot water heater.  The water heater had been replaced about 2 years ago.  At that time, the plumber pointed out that someone had put plywood under the hot water heater, so it had probably leaked before.  But in any case, that plywood looked good so he was not going to put plywood down.  What he didn’t say, and I didn’t notice, is that the plywood only went under half the hot water heater…

Wet Particle Board

So, when, at Ken’s suggestion, I started taking pictures of this mess for my insurance man, we noticed that the hot water heater was leaning.  The particle board under the hot water heater was also soft.  That meant that the hot water heater had to be removed so that they could fix the floor underneath it.  Fortunately, in a previous incarnation, Ken was a plumber, so while Carl continued to work on the floor, Ken started the process of emptying and moving the hot water heater.  We decided that the outside access to the hot water heater was a problem and that, since he was moving it anyway, it would be an improvement to take its enclosure wall down and replace it with a door in the bedroom.

Since the particle board was saturated, it had to be removed.  Which meant chiseling it off the joists in crumbly bits.  The underlying wet insulation also had to be removed.  You get the picture.  This is no longer a one-day job!  At the end of day 1 they put the bed frame back in the bedroom and rehung the bedroom door as the water heater vent was now open into the room.  They did offer to make temporary connections for the hot water heater, but that seemed like a lot of extra work as it would have to be emptied again to relocate it, etc.  So I spent the weekend without hot water and with the living room, yoga room, and spare room stuffed with bedroom stuff.

They came back Monday and took away the last bit of wet particle board that they had hoped would dry out over the weekend.  It didn’t.  Next they had to replace the wet insulation.  The particle board they removed had to be replaced with plywood to make an even flooring for the next layer of plywood.  The floor was also covered with a moisture barrier in preparation for the final layer of plywood and some of the plywood was laid.  The enclosure for the water heater was expanded into the closet which meant that the stuff on the closet shelf had to be removed so they could cut the shelf back by a foot or so.  An outside door was ordered for the water heater closet and the closet itself was fire-rocked with a vent cover to the outside since it is a gas hot water heater.

At the end of day 2, they returned the bed frame to the bedroom and rehung the bedroom door as the vent was still open to both the room and the outdoors.  This time, I realized that I needed to get munchies and nutrition bars out of the pantry before it got blocked.  Should have taken a couple of cans of soup out, too!

Unfortunately, since this was a “one-day” job, they had scheduled other work to “follow” and that work needed to be done.  So I had a few workmen-free days before they returned.  By this time, the floor is looking good and the sheet-rock around the water heater, too.  The new door was installed.  All of this meant the wallpaper (on which I had based the choice of new carpet color) looked really bad and had to go.  But it wasn’t going to be easy to paint over it, or to rip it down.  So they ended up sheet-rocking the whole room.  This is a good thing because the drafty window frames are now more securely wrapped.  (I know.  Caulking the window frames would have been cheaper…)

The new walls have been painted.  Trim has been put in place and painted.  The carpet guys are here now and the carpet looks great against the new paint.  Next step will be to replace the mirrored sliding closet doors.  The floor guys will do that.  Then I can start to reclaim the rest of my house by returning furniture to the bedroom!  But we’re starting week three of this project.  And it’s Thanksgiving week.  (At least I wasn’t planning to host Thanksgiving here, but am going to a friend’s house.)  What do you think?  Will the project ever be finished?  Will I regain the use of my living room?  Yoga room? etc.?

So that’s why today’s post is late!