Post-lift pre-dig

Summerford:

And so it came to pass.

On the first day, the house was lifted. That would be Monday, June 9, for anyone who hasn't been paying attention.

We got up early. John around 7. Me around 7:30. I was coherent by 7:45, sort of. Didn't really matter. What mattered was that I could heft and carry, shove and pull. Choked down some cold cereal with an apple on top. Had to get some carbs because it would be a long day.

We had a few things to do before the lifters arrived.
1. We had to take the top off the living room chimney. (Yes, I know I said in the previous entry that we were going to postpone any action on the LR chimney until later, but the lift man said that the top had to come off now to prevent damage to the roof during the lift. John also had had to separate this chimney from the floors during the previous day or two. I forgot to mention this. He had the pleasure of working in the attic where there hasn't been any fresh air in 100 years and where it is still the temperature of the earth when it emerged from the primordial ooze.
He could not proceed with this work though until the furnace man gave him the go ahead in case he (the furnace man who was due to arrive at 8a.m.) needed to run the furnace before dismantling it.)

2. The furnace had to be dismantled - or at least some of the ducts had to be removed because they would be in the way of the lifters. The furnace man would do all this, freeing up John's time, and also bearing the responsibility for any problems occurring with the furnace when we hooked it back up again. That part is worth whatever we paid him, which was very reasonable.

3. The sewage pipe had to be severed because it is not of the stretchy variety. and would not survive the lift - or the septic tank might be lifted from its resting place.

4. The water inlet pipe had to be severed so it would not get damaged.

As for me, I was tasked with getting us packed up and ready to leave. Clothing. Food. Stuff in general that we couldn't live without. You'd be amazed what's in that list.

By the time John got the chimney taken down to below the roofline, the furnace man was pretty well done with the furnace. John, bless his heart, left the sewage pipe until the very last minute. It's not wise to have a middle-age woman in a house without a functioning toilet for any more than 20 minutes.

The lifters arrived pretty much on schedule. Robert Coates from Glenwood and his crew of four men, two of whom were his sons.

Within the hour, they had cribs (crisscrossed square posts; see top left pic below) started under the house which would support the rails they were inserting from front to back of the house, as well as a place for the jacks which would raise the house, inch by inch.

Within a few minutes of starting to jack it up, the boss realized there was a problem. The floor in the living room was not lifting. Turned out that the living room chimney had been mortared to the sill plate. There was no choice. The chimney had to come down. So the strong fellows bunged a hole in the base of the thing (see top right pic below). John went up to the attic and started bunging the bricks down through and they took them out at the bottom. It was down in less than an hour. And the lift could continue.

By 3pm, with lunch and two coffee breaks, the house was up as far as it needed to go. It is 38" higher in the back than it was before we started. They took a while to get it all level, tweaking this jack or that one to get it just right.

And so it was done. As predicted, my stress level came down as the house went up, although I confess I spent most of the day at a friend's drinking tea and worrying.

We were informed that we were responsible for finding a digger to dig the trenches for the foundation footings. Huh? So why weren't we told this beforehand. We could have had someone lined up to come the very next day. No that would be doing things the easy way. Let's do it the Newfoundland way.

Luckily we had hired a fellow from Lewisporte last year to dig the hole for our septic tank. So we put in a call to him, telling him to call the lifter and arrange a date. We would have see how long this wait might be.

Banging down the LR chimney

In all her glory

 

 

Filling in the blanks

Hillgrade:

I should have made a post between the last one and the one before to show just what we did to get ready for The Lift.

The biggest job was the chimney in the kitchen. It used to be hooked to the wood range but it had to come down since it was leaning dangerously and would have prevented the house from lifting.

It didn't take us long, John and I, to make short work of it last week. John started on the roof and really only had to push it with his little finger to make it come tumbling down. He got it down to below the roof line and then patched the roof with some pink bubble wrap that we had tied around the stuff in our trailer last year when we came down.

Then we got to work on the portion that ran through the Chimney Room (hence the name of the room)[see leftmost picture]. John had a 4-pound sledge hammer (I grew up calling them mauls) for knocking the bricks. The bricks didn't take much coaxing to come loose. We opened the window in the room and threw the bricks out into the backyard.

Pretty soon we could see down into the kitchen, so we cleaned up the Chimney Room and took ourselves downstairs. We had a cup of tea and a little snack before continuing.

It pretty soon became clear that we would need masks for the remainder of the work. The chimney, just below where the stove pipe joined it, was pretty much FULL. Of what we were/are not sure. It was like gravel, but damp and dark [see below]. Probably a mixture of creosote, soot, dust and precipitation that fell through the chimney over the years. It stank. Acrid is a mild word for it.

We needed a tiny shovel to get this stuff out of the chimney before taking the bricks away. John remembered finding a wee shovel in the shed but it was falling apart. However, with a strategically positioned nail, bent at just the right angle, we managed to get a workable shovel.

We were unable to open the window near the kitchen chimney without totally destroying it. So the bricks had to be walked out the door to the yard, two by two.

When we were finished, we were left with a concrete chimney block [at left]. This top of this block would originally have been at floor level, or perhaps just above. Proof of just how badly this house needs to be leveled.

The living room chimney services the furnace. It was originally the chimney for the parlour wood stove. In fact, the furnace pipe comes up through the floor and enters the chimney in the same spot that the stove used [see right]. This whole thing had been boxed in to hide it all, with shelves built around in an attempt to make it somewhat useful. But it took up a lot of space in the Living Room (parlor?) and I was all for getting rid of it.

Except. The chimney was rather nice seen from outside. Gave the house character. Completed the roof line. But not practical inside. What to do? What to do?

We debated long and hard about it. John did a lot of online research to see if our furnace could work with one of those metal chimneys attached to the outside of the house.

It seems that it would, but we decided to postpone this decision until later. Maybe next year. (Update 2023: Little did we know.)

And so. With the kitchen chimney down, we were truly ready for the lift. Bring it on.