May 20, 2004
Some Treasures and Small Progress
The things that we have found; small progress is made downstairs and on the porch.
Dump treasure.
Yard treasure.
3 new trees.
The porch, after demo.
Rotten wood, more pigeons.
More downstairs demo.
Termites!
The wide door.
Some Treasures
We haven’t found the treasures that some other people have found in their house, but we do keep unearthing small things that only reinforce our experience here. We have our yard treasures, which include any number of small toys, countless 40 ounce bottles, 2 bullets, court papers for previous residents, etc. Each one (except the bottles) are a ‘hey look at this‘ moment… There is also the dump treasures, which also include things found in the alleys — all of whatever someone else has deemed useless but that we can’t help but bring home and put on the porch.
We also planted 3 new trees, one of which was a gift from the New Visions Civic League for being new neighbors. I’ve never planted a tree before; I haven’t felt like part of a neighborhood since I was a kid.
The Porch
The porch out back is looking more and more fragile as we become more used to looking at it. It is a 2 level porch that was gross with garbage* when we got the house, and that has suffered the weather and neglect over the years.
We are beginning to accept that the porch will need to be rebuilt. Our recent bout of exploratory demolition on the second floor reveals that the rot along the soffet is complete and that several rafters of the roof are rotted through as well. Now we know…
We feel that this kind of job is bigger than we are up to, so we’ve just started taking quotes on what it might cost. More on this later, I would expect…
Downstairs
The shorter of us spent a few hours last week pulling down the plaster and lathing in the two most recently opened up rooms*. We found that the wide door between the rooms and the entrance way once had a pocket door instead of the wide door that is currently in place. We’d had a hunch about this, having seen the same thing in another house recently. Unfortunately, we also discovered where the termites have been living all of these years. It seems that the downstairs front and right side of the house have some damage, the extent of which we will discover over the next few weeks.
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