Breezeway Part I

On Monday morning, Thomas’s Uncle Rod came by at about 7:30 to start on the breezeway renovation. McCormack’s Lumber delivered shortly thereafter. Rod and I spent the morning totally demolishing the old, much rotted out breezeway that existed for about 52 years. For its age, the infrastructure was stupendous (unlike the one fascist totalitarian Florida Certified President Bush has created in what used to the democratic United States). Sorry for that.

Anyway, Rod and I were surprised to see just how rotted out some of the floor joists and floor boards were. Some of the pictures reflect that. I am enclosing just about all of the pictures I took during the weeklong renovation, so that out of state family and friends can see. We figured this would be better, rather than emailing them to people.

Derek, Rod’s son, came by late in the morning after Rod and I had much of the demolition done. Then, since skill beyond eating crab rangoon was involved from this point on, I backed off a bit and Rod and Derek took over. They stripped about just the whole breezeway off with the exception of the roof and started from scratch. I, meanwhile, started a nice camp fire/burn pile that went from about 9 am to 7pm, burning everything that could fit in our fire pit. The rest was graciously accepted by the one and only Senor Andresen in his huge burn pile right by the Sebasticook River—so I spent most of day 2 lugging a bunch of rotted old wood over to Winslow so that Amanda the Panda could have her garage bay back (we just threw all the scrap wood where she usually parks).

The only really difficult part of the whole process, so far, was installing the back door. For all you carpentry fans out there, it is important to know that 50 some-odd years ago when the garage and breezeway were added on to the house, they had to build the garage at a higher elevation than the house (for some unknown reason) and they essentially made the floor and the roof slanted TOWARDS the house. SO, we had to level out the floor, which meant that once we got to the footer above the windows, we had about a 3 inch difference from the garage side to the house side. But, I guess any time you add “new” to “old,” you have these issues.

Sorry for being wordy . . .part of why I am writing this much is so we can remember all this when we look at it years later (if the internet is still around . . ha ha). Where we are presently, on Tuesday evening, is that everything is installed except the front door. Also, some finish/touch up needs to be done. Anyone know how to take off aluminum siding?

The second blog posted tonight is just pictures . . .no more text. Happy 4th of July everyone!!!—Jared and Amanda