Step 26 a

 

The saga of restoring "normal" continues. Here's one of the four holes to tile from the foundation piers. Does not look too bad after Carl cut the edges clean and I used a power hammer to chip out the broken stuff. Then I put the new tile down....three times. Some of them kept popping loose the next two days. Finally I quit tapping them to see which ones weren't really stuck down and just grouted the whole thing. I was already going to the chiropractor to restore my hip to balance by then, and there's more to life than stuck tile, I was thinking. Life finishing the landscaping after the foundation repair.

Indeed I was right, there was more to life than tile, there was plumbing! I really did not want this to be a do-it-yourself job, but it was. This man is determined, no? He dug the hole, I took the muck down the street in a wheelbarrow to the next new home to built, aka, currently a vacant lot. Four contractor barrel loads as I remember. Luckily, it was a joint failure from a previous repair near the edge of the slab. All it required was Carl to crawl under the house a bit and smell stinky dishwater from the last few years. There is no way you could pay me to do that. Then we blew 20 bags of sand under the foundation using the leaf blower (my idea). (Just a little aside: did you know that at Lowe's they will sell you a 1,000 lb bag of sand? Picture that in your Smart Car.) After 15 bags of dirt I replanted the flower bed. The next day, I unplanted the bed again when the sink started draining slow. After two power snakings, things are flowing fine again. I replanted once more, hopefully for the last time.

I am SO glad to be done with this roof, window, slab, plumbing spring! But hey, I found a silver lining. The insurance deductible on our roof/windows is deductible from our taxes because Ike made us a federal disaster area. Not that we have much income to shelter any more, but hey, it was a few dollars less in taxes.

So, now, on to better things. We are getting ready, as soon as Carl bicycles 150 miles to Austin, to turn our minds to the summer RV trip. It starts in Sante Fe with a Habitat for Humanity build and goes to points West and back.