What happens when "Do It Yourself" types shouldn't have done it themselves

This year, as I'm trying to get outside to tend to my flower gardens and do the spring cleaning, my husband is trying to get a few projects done that should result in a lower cost for heating the house when he's finished.

You see, when we bought our house in 1998, we were madly in love with it, because it was unique and showed major potential for being a magnificent home when we did some remodeling to remove some of the "kinks" that the previous homeowner had caused to occur.  Then life happened.

Instead of spending the yearly income tax refund on remodeling, as we planned to do when pushing through the paperwork for the mortgage, we've had little "hiccups".  Here are just a few of those:

A beam that held up the front porch was rotting when the inspector did the walk through and gave us a list of things that had to be fixed before we could get financing.  He mentioned replacing the porch rail, but missed the beam.  To avoid a ton of paperwork, we propped up the roof and put a new deck under it in 2000.  The roof still needs to be replaced and is on the docket for next year's repairs.  

The former owner KNEW her septic system was on the way out and needed to be replaced.  She'd had various companies bid for the work, one of whom had even marked out where the new septic tank and leach field area would go with sticks that had been pounded into the ground.  (We learned about this when the neighbor across the street, who was friends with my husband's grandparents, came over and asked why we'd removed the sticks.)  We got the new septic put in during the summer of 2002.

My husband has had a broken wrist at work and a broken foot while riding a friend's jet ski.  He was able to go to work, but got no overtime while those injuries healed - and, in the case of the wrist, while he healed twice, as the screws and plate they used to put him back together caused problems and had to be removed again after a year.  Between him not being healthy enough to tackle the work and using the income tax to cover the bills that would have been taken care of by the overtime, those years were a wash when it came time to do remodeling.

In addition to taking out walls to give the whole first floor a very "open" feel, the former owners had added a "sun room/greenhouse" onto the back of the house.  According to the specs on the permit they got through the town, this was to be glass walled and put onto sonar tubes.  That isn't what they did.  The addition was solid sided with big plexiglass windows and a large sliding door leading to the back yard, but obviously no one ever explained "support beams" to these do it yourselfers.  The roof above the glass doors started to collapse, so one whole summer was dedicated to removing the glass door, properly supporting the back wall, and putting in smaller door.  It turned into a much larger project than expected because nothing was properly weatherproofed as they built, so instead of just taking apart and rebuilding one small section of the wall, the entire length had to be re-done.  Instead of having the money to fix up the part under the plexiglass windows where they put wood right onto the dirt with no cement footer to prevent rot and no protection against the insects and critters that come up from the dirt to eat the wood, the cash we had was all eaten up in the materials to fix their mess.  The "greenhouse" portion is one of the sections of the house that will just be getting taken off and not rebuilt, but the wall between the "greenhouse" and the main house has to be rebuilt first.

And of course, we have two children whom we've bailed out for a couple of years when they needed financial help, but couldn't get the loans they needed.

In short, the work we foresaw having to do when we first bought the house is finally getting started this year.  A couple of the walls that have been slowly starting to bow a little from having support beams removed are being opened up so that we can assess any extra work that we'll need to do, as the first "rewall" project showed that, when they took the walls out, they put good wood under rotting timbers, meaning that the support structure is in even worse condition than we thought, so we need to do more work than we thought was going to be needed.  (The photo below shows one of these rotted timbers, for those who want to see what I'm talking about.  The large beam that takes up most of this shot was put in under a water damaged beam, so the top of the larger beam was starting to rot as well.)

I've been doing something of a photo diary of the progress on this current project on Facebook, so suffice to say that the rotting stuff has been removed, new wood has been installed, and the wall closed up to make a desperately needed set of kitchen shelves.  The finished shelving unit is about 8 feet by 8 feet (a little over 2 meters square for my readers who use the metric system), and I'm looking forward to some of the rotted bits coming off in the next project.  At the time of this post, this is what I currently have where this big hole in the wall existed:

(Within the coming week, there will be framework added to the front and it will have doors added, but it's much more impressive than the hole....)

Now if I can just get enough of the books to sell to cover some of the materials needed that are going to go above and beyond the current money we have available.......

*smile*

\UPDATE 5/16:  The shelves are nearing completion, they have two layers of polyurethane painted on, and this morning, I stenciled on ivy leaves before doing two more layers of polyurethane.  My hubby still needs to add on three more boards, then the doors, but this is how this little project looks as of the moment:

(One of my mother-in-law's neighbors stenciled every room of her house, which I found tremendously beautiful, so I vowed to do the same one day.  Guess it's the day....)  Soon, we're on to project number 2, which will culminate with the removal of a room that, according to the town office, wasn't built to specs anyway, and therefore doesn't exist.......