Carpenter’s nightmare

In the beginning we had everything figured out: We would buy a carpenter’s nightmare, live in it as we fixed it up, sell and buy a better house.
We stayed 10 y ears — did the dining room twice, the kitchen floor three times, resided the porch and then enclosed it.
The realtor assured us the septic tank and reservoir heated by the furnace were adequate. He said we would be exempt from city ordinances to hook up to city water and sewer until the septic tank went out.
The house had sat empty for three years. We bought it in mid-winter, it the ancient furnace and turned on the water. The pipes coughed out rusty, lukewarm water. The septic system was dead.
“It’s been sitting a while,” my husband said, “It will clear up.”
It did not clear up.
My parents bought us a new hot water heater. We called a backhoe operator. My husband connected the new hot water heater to the ancient pipe. The pipe broke, as did the next pipe and the next. “The plumbing has to be replaced,” he said.
A week later we had new pipes, clean hot water and a muddy trail in our backyard over our new sewer line.
As we planned our first garden we said we would not plant asparagus and strawberry plants. We knew we would be gone before the beds matured. When we moved 10 years later we left a prosperous strawberry patch and a mini-forest of asparagus.
We said remodeling the kitchen was too expensive. It would have to wait a few years. Within two years we had a completely refurbished kitchen.
Every time we passed a house jacked up on beams while the owners dug out a basement, my husband looked longingly, sighed and said, “But our house is not worth the time and expense.”
We spent three years digging out, building walls and finished a basement. We used an ancient dirt elevator we bought from a college professor. He used it to carry out the dirt shoveled from his basement. The professors’ main problem had been dirt collapsing into the basement before the block walls were built.
The neighbors said our major problem would be breaking up the clay. One neighbor said he had resorted to dynamite on a basement. He mused, “the woman who live there always found it convenient to be gone when we were using dynamite.”
Husband, son and friend fought that clay with a pick ax. None of it collapsed into the basement – until the second year – when it rained every day. The rain soaked into the clay, weighed it down, loosening its sticky hold. Gravity ruled and the clay avalanched into the basement, knocking out eight-inch oak beams supporting the house.
I found it convenient to wit outside until my husband rushed home from work to replace the beam. The next time two beams were knocked out and his boss said, “you have other beams holding up the house. It will be OK.”
I stayed outside anyway. The house stayed up.
It was one time when things happened exactly the way someone said it would.


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