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Mountain Man Mondays; Hmm, I Think The Floor is Falling

Thanks everyone for the well wishes for the trip home and your wonderful comments.  Weather permitting, we are going to leave for Vermont in the next couple of days.  Mountain Man has reached a natural stopping point in his work here.  He wants to go home and make the kitchen cabinets and the wood flooring and the framing for the new porch addition.  It doesn’t seem the real estate market is picking up here so instead of a mad rush to finish the house and get it on the market, we’re going to slow down and once again enjoy next winter in the Ozarks.

And for this final Mountain Man Mondays from the Ozarks, I thought I’d go back to the beginning.  The disrepair of the house was quite a shock.  From the walls full of holes and critters to the unvented sewer lines, the house provided one challenge after another but nothing can quite describe the feeling of walking on the floors.  The farm house sits over a basement.  It’s a great feeling to know there’s an underground space in case of a tornado but to support the house back in those days, the builder used oak floor joists spaced quite a distance one from the other which meant that if you walked anywhere in the house, you could literally see the floor sag with each step.  So the first chore on Mountain Man’s list was to keep all of us from falling into the basement below.

Originally, the entrance to the basement was just a trap door in the ground which led to a dark, dank, cavernous space.  I can’t show you what it looked like because I never found the courage to crawl down into that hole. Visions of poisonous spiders and super sized rats kept my feet firmly above ground.

Mountain Man decided to make an actual entrance into the basement; more user friendly.  There’s also an inner door at the base of the stairs which can be pulled shut if the basement were to be used as a tornado shelter.

Here’s a picture of the original cedar posts holding up the house.

The previous owner tried to shore it up by stuffing bricks underneath the cedar posts which didn’t solve the problem because there was just too much space between the posts to support all that floor.

Mountain Man first had to take the sag out of each floor joist in order to get the floor straight.  This really is not a one person job.  The amount of physical effort that goes into it is incredible and backbreaking doesn’t begin to describe it but Mountain Man wouldn’t let me help so he did it by himself.  First, he jacked up the oak joists one at a time with a temporary 2 x 4 post and then built the girder.  While he was doing this, the dogs and I were bouncing up and down on the floor above, imagine being on a trampoline only much noisier.  Here’s some pictures of the old mixed with the new.

 

  

  

Now our floors are level and strong.

And because it is Mountain Man’s day, I had to include a picture of him working on the furnace which also decided to break. But, of course, he got it fixed.

Be well everyone and we’ll see you in Vermont!