I wonder, sometimes, if it’s become an
obsession. An addiction, perhaps? Some people can’t tear
themselves away from computer chat rooms, or video games, or
even a crossword puzzle. Steven and I, on the other hand,
can’t seem to pass up the opportunity to jack up a structure,
remove rotted timbers and replace them with straight, sound
beams. Its part and parcel of the glamorous life we lead.
My first experience with this remarkable
hobby came when we purchased our old farmhouse. The original
structure is upwards of one hundred and fifty years old. The
cellar walls are granite block and rock, but the exterior beams
were disintegrating, and the floor joists were nothing but
four-to-six inch logs that were sagging, beetle-infested,
rotting--and in some places--cobbled together with another to
keep them in place. The whole underpinning needed to be
replaced. We dug out the dirt floor and set concrete pads,
borrowed a dozen screw and hydraulic jacks and lifted the house
off the foundation. Old beams were pulled away from the
sub-flooring and the actual sills were cut away from the base of
the wall framing with a reciprocating saw.
On the day the new sills were put into
place along the granite base, the men in the family came to
assist Steven. That left me free to work on the second floor,
where I was enjoying the heck out of my first experience with
using a pneumatic nailer. Steven and I had gutted the house of
plaster and lathe. We’d discovered that the rafters were
nothing more than 2x4’s, and since we wanted to insulate the
house for maximum efficiency, that meant the rafters had to be
furred out. Using squares of plywood for strength and
stability, we were affixing new 2x4’s to the old ones, giving us
more than seven inches of free space in which to vent from
soffit to peak and then fill with fiberglass. Since it was
difficult to hold a ten foot long two-by in place while tacking
with a traditional hammer, someone had suggested a pneumatic
nailer would be JUST THE THING for the job. So, of course, I
had to give it a try!
In hindsight, it wasn’t a wise decision.
In the first place, I had a subconscious tendency to shut my
eyes before pulling the ‘trigger’. If you’ve ever done any
target practicing with a firearm, you’ll know that your chances
of hitting the bull’s eye decrease quite dramatically when your
eyes are scrunched tight. I set some nails, all right, but not
in any place where they’d accomplish my goal. I was standing on
a rickety wooden step-ladder, holding up a two-by with one hand
(the plywood had already been attached to it) and attempting to
lift the heavy nailer--along with its cumbersome hose--with the
other. The ladder was rim-wracked and wobbly, my right arm
holding the lumber over my head was tired and shaking, and in my
left arm was a death tool…loud, powerful, and dangerous. And
just when I was getting the hang of it, JUST when I began to
have confidence that at least one or two nails would penetrate
the plywood true so that I could relax and drop my arm—the house
shifted. And when the house shifted, the ladder followed suit.
Being a conformist back then, I moved with the ladder, and the
nailer took the hint given by my flailing arm and bounced right
along with me. My finger hit the trigger reflexively, and
several nails went a-flying. Fast. Pneumatically fast. Which
is--trust me—SOME kind of FAST! Thank God I was alone in the
house. That’s all I can say.
Anyway, since replacing the sills in our
home, we have also jacked up two camps on our property and
replaced their rotting timbers. Then, we bought a camp on
Gilman Pond. Of course, one of the big selling points was that
it was sagging and bagging in all the right places. It needed
sills! Yippee! We simply HAD to have it!
But it’s been some years since we’ve had a
chance to test our skills at leveling and squaring a building.
So Steven thought we should re-enter the field cautiously, and
with a small project. The outhouse.
The building isn’t very big…maybe four by
six feet, and ten feet tall at its peak. And since it was
practically sitting on the ground, there wasn’t enough room to
place our twenty-ton jacks underneath it. At least, I assume
those two reasons are why my husband decided a simple lever
system would be the way to go. Who needs a jack when you have a
cement block and a rugged, heavy crow bar at your disposal? Not
us! No way, no how!
We took turns. Steven would place the tip
of the bar under the building, and using the cement block as the
fulcrum, he would push down on the other end with everything he
had. And…he’d move the privy and inch or two. He then expected
me to take out the blocks that had been underneath the outhouse
and slide in the new four-by-six-inch pressure-treated posts.
Four-by-six inches, to fit into a two inch gap. While HE
attempted to stabilize a teetering building that was balanced on
a point approximately one inch wide. Things got a little testy,
if you can imagine that!
It was apparent that I was useless as the
‘replacer of the sill’, so we swapped out. I gave it a good ole
Bessey effort and tipped that back-house into the air. That’s
not to say, of course, that I am stronger than Steven! And
that’s DEFINITELY not any kind of hint that I weigh more,
either! Heavens, no! I prefer to think, instead, that I
understand the laws of leverage better than Steven does. I
tipped the fulcrum on its SIDE, so it was taller. You see…size
really DOES matter.
The right-hand sill went in quite
quickly. We moved bar and block over to the left. Steven—no
doubt taking his cues from his magnificent wife--repositioned
the concrete and tilted the privy. I quickly grabbed the new
timber and attempted to shove it under the bottom plate. It hit
something which I couldn’t see, and got hung up. I laid down
and tried to peer under the building. No visibility, no luck.
Steven barked at me. His arms and neck were corded from
exertion, and he hollered at me to go around to the back, where
he had removed the bottom of the wall, and PULL the timber in.
You heard me say he removed the bottom of
the wall, right? The bottom of the back wall. Of the privy.
Yes.
I’ll just insert here that I am not ALWAYS
a gorm. I am not ALWAYS a klutz. I have, on occasion,
displayed a certain grace. June of 1993 comes to mind! But,
we’d had seventeen straight days of rain, and the ground was
slick with muck and mud. Therefore, it was the weather which
was at fault when I slid in the sludge and landed on my bottom.
It was the weather’s short-comings which were to blame when my
right foot then slid into the pit.
But the giggling was my fault.
Steven saw no humor in the incident. He
was fighting a life-and-death struggle to keep the outhouse from
toppling over onto me. So I suppose I can forgive him for
yelling at me and squelching my hysterical glee (which was
mingled with a modicum of disgust, of course, to say nothing
about toilet paper.) But his attitude toward my brief visit to
the underbelly of the backhouse sucked the fun right out of the
project. What a potty pooper!
Is there a moral to this story? Aw, heck,
no. It’s just a story about trying to make an outhouse flush.
