Beach house #8 – when it rains, it pours
So remember how there were termites in the walls? …. yeah. Turns out there were termites in the sill plate, as well. Just the, you know, foundation of the house.
You know how they fix that? They jack the house up in the air. Seriously. If we didn’t think this rehab project was getting real earlier? It sure is now!
Oh, AND. Fun surprise – if you gut more than 50% of your house, you’re suddenly responsible for updating the whole electrical system too! Whee! Turns out not to be such a terrible thing, really, because some of the electrical work we found… let’s just say it was done with the same care as the framing. The wires, for instance, were often just taped on. I found a couple junction boxes that had clearly been sparking and smoking for a long time, a few boxes with melted insulation along the ends of the wires, a few junction boxes just…. just wide open.
Again, it’s a problem I didn’t wish for but one that I’m glad we found. We can put in all new electrical from scratch and have the confidence of knowing that the entire system is totally modernized, properly and carefully.
And on the upside, like I was telling Josh the other night – after my initial freakout we’ve been handling this all quite tidily and calmly. In fact we even found some foundation issues, got a structural engineer in there the next day, and we’re getting it fixed right alongside the sill plates, no problem, ta-da.
If we can handle all this – termites, load-bearing walls, sill plates, foundations, plumbing, whole electrical systems, basically rebuilding the house from the ground up? We can handle anything. I feel so much more capable and I’m learning so much that we’re already (well, I’m already) starting to think about next time.