A different sort of vacation

[oloriel]

In Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, little Frankie's family is living in a two-storied flat for a while where the ground floor gets flooded every winter, so during the wettest months they live exclusively on the upper level. To cheer things up a little, their father says that it's like going on vacation to a dry warm Southern country like Italy, and that's what the kids call the upper story from then on, Italy.

In analogy, I am writing this from the Netherlands.


No, our roof hasn't crumbled, nor is it leaking. There was a bit of a deluge (+ heavy winds) earlier this day, but by now the rain has given way to wet snowflakes and the wind has stopped. But that has nothing to do with why I am living exclusively on the lower level of our house.
You see, the levels of our house are (unsurprisingly) linked by stairwells. Those who have already visited will remember that they are rather steep and narrow stairwells. The one linking ground floor and first floor has been particularly steep for almost two years now, because it was moved at that point and because the foot could not move along (and besides, was half-rotted anyway, although it was offering a safe and comfortable breeding space for a variety of spiders), it was sort of one stair short, so the very last step has been rather large and a bit of a challenge to the physically unfit. At that point we also removed the banister, which was likewise half-rotted and we agreed that it was better to see right away that there was nothing to hold on to than to trust one's lie to a banister held by nothing but faith and one rusty nail.

My mother never liked the stairwells, even when she had come to terms with the rest of the house, and in the past two years she has been nagging us incessantly to replace the stairwell. Which we would have done, really, if we'd just had the ten thousand Euros and there hadn't been more urgent projects to deal with. (Oddly enough, important though the stairwell was to my mother, she somehow didn't have the ten thousand Euros either.)

When last the topic was raised, my brother jokingly interjected that I should just get pregnant because that'd surely fix a deadline. (That happened to be on the day when I'd done the pregnancy test, so it was rather hard to keep my mouth shut.) Actually the stair project was by then planned for early this year anyway. For February, to be exact, because there's one of the few weeks this year when Jörg actually has a chance to use up his vacation time.
As February is no longer all that far away, this weekend we started the preparations. We started this early because we fully expected to discover a rotten beam or two and wanted enough time to deal with such problems.

When you expect problems... they turn out so more complicated!

We did indeed discover "a rotten beam or two". Or three - the two central beams carrying the weight of the first floor, and the level beam connecting them. Our exceedingly clever and competent predecessors, when they tiled the kitchen floor, were clever enough to put a moisture barrier underneath the (disturbingly thin) screed layer... but not clever enough to figure that, if 99% of your floor are safe from rising damp, the remaining 1% will be attacked and damaged by the damp all the more. The level beam (oak!) had turned to mulch and splinters pretty much entirely, and the feet of the carriers (likewise oak!) could be broken away with bare hands. Joy.
They are also - again - full of bungholes in places where none are needed for the task at hand. When the main part of the house was built they apparently recycled loads of used beams, presumably from the house that stood there before. Sad thought: These beams survived a house that was destroyed in the 1630s, and have been holding up a new house since the 1650s, and then in the 1980s some short-sighted idiots come along and destroy them. (Again. We've found similar issues during work on the first floor a few years ago, and will no doubt find more once we get around to dealing with further walls.)

Anyway.
The ditch where the level beam used to rot be has been cleared out and filled with concrete now to the level of the moisture barrier. Once the concrete is cured, it'll be painted with bitumen and covered with a layer of tar paper, and then new beams can be set in. Fortunately our carpenter (who's also responsible for the new stairwell) has a nice collection of old beams (we can recycle, too!), so that's not much of a problem, except that of course we had to hold up the floor with construction poles to make up for the rotted beams... which means that there is no more room for the stairwell, even the old one, until the beams are replaced.

Climbing ladders is, for some reason, one of the things they tell pregnant women not to do, even if said women are perfectly capable of climbing ladders even when their pants are starting to be a bit tight, thank you very much. Climbing ladders when they're home alone for a few days and won't be found for a while if they slip and break their legs, though, is a bit of a risk.
And that's why I packed a box of necessaries and am currently living on the ground floor. In the Netherlands.

Another problem is that now that our carpenter has seen how thin the screed layer is, and not knowing what's underneath (might be stamped loam, or rock, but might also be something less reliable like a blocked-up ex-cellar or the like), he doesn't want to put the full weight of the new stairwell onto that potentially treacherous floor. So instead of "just" removing the old tiles (two layers, because our darling predecessors just stuck new tiles on the fugly tiles from earlier in the century) and lay new flags (better! prettier!) as we had thought, we'll have to excavate the whole floor in the hallway (kitchen will remain as is for the time being; we'll be getting there (much) later) and cast new screed and then lay the better, prettier new flags. Jörg and I are fairly relaxed even though that probably won't be done by the second week of February (especially as I can't help as much as I used to :p). Our carpenter, on the other hand, is surprisingly (and touchingly) upset about it. He feels that it's unfair of the universe to put so much trouble into one house, particularly if people are expecting a child, and what exactly have we done wrong in our past life to be punished this way?


I for my part am half amused and half optimistic. I'm sure glad my parents are currently skiing in Austria (the actual country), though, so my mother doesn't see what's going on here...

Comments

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Considering the amount of botching ubiquitous in buildings built in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and probably afterwards, the only wise decision is actually doing the entire thing oneself. (Note that all the things that are wrong about our house have been done in the 1920s and 1980s. The basic structure is just fine, otherwise the whole project would've been doomed three years ago.) Or taking one of the rare Really Old Buildings (TM) that have already been restaured. But those tend to cost rather too much for people of normal income. *sigh*

As I said, I'm half-amused and half-optimistic. Neither requires sympathy ;)