Monday, July 28

I've got a bigger bathroom than you do.
There used to be a lump in our dining room floor. I suppose I should call it a heaving bulge, considerable in size. If you balanced a 3 ft. level on it, you would have over an inch from the ends to the ground. After two years of living with it, and worrying if our house was falling down, I called in the pros. For $150 I had a structural engineer come in and spend an hour with me measuring, discussing and deliberating. Of course he had no instant solution. He proposed three different causes and three different off the cuff solutions. One involved removing hardwood flooring and planing down the joists; not an option. the second was to notch out where the joists rested on the foundation wall so that the fell about an inch; also not an option for a do-it-yourselfer. The third option was to remove a primitive bead-board planked wall and cabinet surrounding a bathroom in the basement. Ahh, demolition! I can handle that. His theory, which he wasn't as convinced as I had hoped, was that this wall around the bathroom was built close to the building of the house (1920) and it had inadvertantly became a load bearing wall when the house settled and these basement walls didn't, thus the heaving.

So I started tearing down the wall. In the midst of progress was another setback. Termite damage. That will have to wait. But after a little rewiring of electric and hauling out a lot of wood, one last board remained. I am guessing that his theory was correct since this lone board, now bearing all the weight alone, was bowing so tautly under the pressure that once was distributed. I started to saw it and SNAP! I ran upstairs to measure and the floor had settled half of an inch! Only time and some large dinner parties will remedy it now. Meanwhile at 25' x 30', I am confident in the claim that I have the largest bathroom in town!