This is the DIY history of the house that won’t get finished. Chapter links at bottom of the page.
Stories of the daily challenges of DIY home maintenance are in DIY projects.
Foundations or How to Make it Rain
The Denver area averages less than 16 inches of precipitation a year. Or so it was until we started foundation work for the last major addition on This House.
I engaged the help of a neighbor who I like to call Mountain Man Mike. Mike had the beard, hair, guns, and interest in history to lay claim to the title mountain man. Fortunately, since we worked very closely together, I never noticed any mountain man smell. My journal entries from that time include:
03/28/04 (project kickoff day)
Sunday, started out cloudy, turned overcast, spit mean little bullets of snow. Great! After days of balmy weather, the day we are to work outside was turning out to be a stay inside type day.
04/07/04 (Wednesday)
It’s raining again today. Hah! We chose not to start in March because it is usually Colorado’s snowiest month. A year-ago March we had three feet of snow in one storm on top of an inch or more of rain before the snow even started.
So here in March ‘04 we get a grand total of fourteen one-hundredths of an inch precipitation. That looks like this: 0.14 inch. Then April happened.
04/25/04 (Sunday)
Well we have a foundation hole, but precipitation continues to be a problem. Too much water has made the soil mucky and the city may require the muck to be dug out and replaced with gravel, or, horrors, the hole to be filled in with dirt to absorb the water and then dug out again.
Last Wednesday it started raining with snow in the forecast. Mike suggested we put up our plastic hole cover. I declined. Thursday morning I asked if he could help me with the plastic before the rain turned to snow.
By nine, it was still raining, but the rain was turning to slush in the folds of the plastic. By Friday morning the north end of the plastic had collapsed into the hole. It dragged a hunk of concrete that must have weighed seventy or eighty pounds into the hole with it. It’s still there in the crawl space.
Today it was raining again. Mike called at nine a.m. I was just settling in to read the Sunday paper. He suggested we use cans and buckets and get the water off the north end of the plastic and raise it back up to help dry things out. We did. Then Mike brought down his little Salamander heater, which looks something like a primitive jet engine, but is great for answering yes to that age-old parental question: Are you trying to heat the whole outdoors?
04/29/04 (Thursday)
About 9 p.m. it got windy and when I let dogs out at 2 this morning, it was raining lightly, which it did off and on for the rest of the morning. But we got the footer poured, though we had to keep the work covered. Again, return of the rain.
05/03/04 (Tuesday)
John and Doug (interesting name for an excavation guy) are forming up the foundation walls today. We had another rain and snow storm over the weekend. This precipitation is getting quite old, but Mike and I are gearing up to sell our services as rainmakers.
How to screw up foundation work. See Concrete Wheelbarrow Blues.
John made the comment that water and fire are the two biggest enemies of houses, with water being the worst, since it is universal and fire is thankfully rather rare.
05/07/04 (Friday)
Well, the foundation wall forms are ready. But again we wait. But wait! This time it’s not because of rain. Seems the original concrete company that John ordered from suddenly went out of business.
And, if it is indeed good luck to start building in the rain, then we earned ourselves a whole passel of good luck to go forward with the Final Phase addition to the little old house we have spent over thirty years being too stubborn, or too stupid – and, yes, sometimes you can’t tell stubborn from stupid – to give up on and move out.