It didn’t take long after the mudroom floor issues came to light for us to realize we were dealing with something similar in the master bedroom. An addition that was built along the opposite end and other side of the trailer, the master bedroom has two exterior walls that form a corner and span 22 feet and 18 feet, respectively. In that corner sits a portal to hell, I can only surmise, disguised as a fireplace that likely hasn’t worked properly since Elvis Presley paid a surprise visit to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (It was December 21st, 1970, in case you’re hazy on the date. And Richard Nixon was still president.)
Having spent the better part of five months using that room to prime, paint, and repaint a seemingly endless number of doors, baseboards, and other trim, I was more than a little aware of the slope in that floor well before we discovered the reason behind the mudroom slope. I worried about it a lot and wondered often if we should open it up and have a look at the stringers before we put down carpeting, or if we should at least dig down along on the outside of the walls to see what was going on.
The Jarhead was less familiar with the slope in the master bedroom, having spent the bulk of his time in other parts of the dwelling and performing tasks that didn’t involve brushes and rollers but did require strength, agility and a facility with foul language that I simply hadn’t mastered. But by the time he got around to installing my painstakingly painted doors and trim in that room, even he realized something was off. And since the mudroom issues had come to light by then he, too, was afraid it would be expensive and a major pain in the ass to fix. (I’ve come a long way with my facility with foul language in case you hadn’t noticed.)
Out of respect for our brave men and women who’ve seen actual combat, I won’t equate what we were experiencing with PTSD, but I will go so far as to say we were more than a little gun shy. Having found materials like broom handles and spare siding serving as stringers in the mudroom, we could barely bring ourselves to contemplate what we might encounter next. In fact, after seeing what was holding up (or NOT holding up) the mudroom floor, I would not have been surprised to find tree limbs, discarded shelving, curtain rods, or a bundle of cardboard holding up portions of the floor in that bedroom.
I probably should have pressed the issue before the carpet went in when it was more cost-effective to do so. But I was afraid. How many times, after all, had I thought someone was breaking into the house when in fact the sounds I heard were the furnace starting or the washing machine draining between cycles? How many times had I feared I was having a heart attack or when in fact I merely had to burp? And how many times had I mentally convicted Donald Trump of being a gigantic narcissistic ass only to realize he was actually a gigantic narcissistic ass?
Okay. Bad example.
In any case before I could bring it up, I was forced to ask myself: Am I willing to push the Jarhead to open up the floor simply because it felt wonky? Am I willing to ask him to forego other tasks only to find the walls and floors had been built precisely as they should have been? More importantly, how on earth would I manage to live it down if I was wrong? Did I really want to die on that hill? (Pun fully intended.)
Having read all that, you can probably imagine, what a double-edged sword it was when the Jarhead admitted that the slope of the bedroom floor was probably evidence that the room lacked footings. And how it felt like a guillotine descending above me when he gravely suggested that there was a better than even chance that the same was true with the exterior walls in the den.
Better? Better?? Don’t say better when what you’re saying is much, much worse!
But, with all the other major projects finished and Covid-19 vaccines offering us the chance to reconnect with family and friends we hadn’t seen in over a year, we decided to leave it alone for a while. It’s not as if the room was caving in—at least not as soon as the awning would have, anyway. Plus, with lumber getting scarce and spendy thanks to the ongoing pandemic, it made sense to hold off, stash some cash, and concentrate on finishing the smaller less expensive projects on our list.
Like installing hardware in the exterior door in that very same master bedroom.
Notice I didn’t say ‘replacing’ or ‘fixing.’ This is because there was nothing to fix or replace. For reasons unknown to me at the time, both the knob and deadbolt on the door that led the back deck (which you can clearly see in the before photos above) had been removed at some point after demo began. Which meant that, by the time I started priming, painting, and installing bathroom flooring, cold air had been streaming in through two holes the size of baseball-sized-hailstones for WHO KNOWS how long. And, because the door was binding at the top left and bottom right corners (mostly likely because it was framed without a proper header and was being pulled out of plumb by the wall without proper footings) I could not even pry it open to, say, escape a fire, if that had been my only way out. Which meant I would have to break a window instead, since none of them would open either.
I noticed the doorknob problem when I started working on my painting projects in early December 2019, and found myself wondering how it could be that there had been three to six men onsite (including the Jarhead) on any given day since the end of October and despite being smart and skilled in the building trades, not one of them had devised a way to cover the holes and stop the cold air from coming in. It took little old Liberal Arts Annie to figure out you could stuff a bunch of rags in those holes and put an end to this bloody Dickensian misery.
Between you and me and the bedpost, it was meant to be a temporary solution. But days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, and so on. I got so used to seeing those rags, I didn’t even notice when the Jarhead installed an actual knob and deadbolt.
Later, when he asked me how I liked the hardware, I thought he meant the matte black knobs and hinges he had put on the interior doors several weeks before and said with a confused shrug that they were great. But since it wasn’t like him to ask my opinion on projects he’d completed that far in the past (because, honestly, it’s not like him to RECALL projects he’s completed that far in the past) I thought maybe HE was having second thoughts about the black knobs. So I asked how he liked them, and soon we were mired in a version of Who’s on First the likes of which would make Abbot and Costello cringe.
Anyway, at some point as I was cropping a picture I had taken of that area I noticed the new hardware on the door in the background and realized WTF he had been talking about. Of course, it had been so long since we’d bought those knobs that I forgot we even had them, and I was so used to the rags being there that I didn’t even notice when they were finally gone.
Which almost makes me almost want to take back some of the things I was thinking when I shoved those rags into those holes that fall.
Almost.
the uncommon blonde 