Lifting up a house..

In addition to a whole mess of cosmetic issues, our little cabin in the woods had a busted up foundation to boot. Yay! 

There were two major issues:

1. the block foundation was cracked due to water damage 

2. the wood (rim joists as the cool kids call them) were rotting in several spots.

The previous home owner tried to pull a fast one and said the entire repair would only cost about 3k, and even had a contractor make a fake quote for the realtor. However, as those who know me can tell you, I have no time for that kind of tomfoolery and threatened to pull out of the agreement when we found out. How did we find out you might wonder? Well, we called said contractor and he told us he made the estimate as a favor and that it was not real, AND we got it on voicemail, if you are going to lie cover your tracks buddy. The actual cost for both repairs was going to be 20k, not three.

So we got the previous seller to meet us in the middle and cover 10k. With that loot, we hired an awesome contractor named Nathan to fix all the block work. He also added drainage so we won't be in the same sad shape in a few years. His cost was $11,000.  

This is me in the crawl space. AKA hell on earth

Now onto the rim joists. We learned that too would cost about $10,000. That number was not in our budget and we were a little salty. After watching a few YouTube videos and reading a couple articles, Jose decided we would just do it ourselves. 

Do you know how rim joists are repaired? I sure didn't. Well it turns out to fix them you need to lift the house up, remove/replace/repair the bad wood with good wood and then gingerly set the house back down.

Now I am as cheap as they come, but there are certain times when you need to draw the line, I felt like this was one of them. Jose was committed though, so we did it. And no one even got crushed.

It was a little more involved than all this, but basically we took a saw and cut the bottom of the siding off the cabin so we could see where the bad wood was, then we went under the house into the crawl space (awful place) and used car jacks (seriously car jacks) to lift her up. We then pulled out the bad stuff and replaced it section by section. 

This was summer, there is just always snow

why yes that is a car jack my house is resting on

Debating his next move

Project notes-

Duration: one full weekend

Medication: When lifting a house whilst underneath it I recommend total sobriety. 

Reflection: Our cell reception at the cabin is hit or miss. This particular weekend it was a miss, so we had no jams. The only album we could get to play on spotify was bleach by nirvana. over and over. I kind of still hate nirvana which makes me sad, if I were to do this again I would download some tunes.

Recommendation: If a contractor quotes you ten thousand dollars and you don't have it, just go on YouTube and hope it doesn't result in disaster.

$$$: The total cost to us was about $1,500 for the supplies/wood and the $1,000 we paid the contractor who repaired the block. The total cost if you factor in what the seller paid was $11,500.