Howard, Howard, and Fine Home Remodeling

 

A few years ago our second youngest son, Andy, started his teaching and coaching career with a job at our local school.  He taught junior high math and coached, as head or assistant, high school football, basketball, and track.

Besides being the beginning of his teaching career, it was the first stage of his marriage to Madison, a beautiful girl from Jonesboro, Arkansas.  She graduated from ASU, where they met, a year behind him, and started her teaching career an equal amount of time after he did.

Then he started remodeling a house.

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When we found out the two were engaged, we offered the little house on our farm to the couple.  My mom, who owns the farm, was overjoyed.

Sounded good to everyone, but there was one problem.  Despite several renovations and remodels over the years the little house had fallen into disrepair.  Plus, the four room house was a little smaller than either of them was accustomed to.  Over the course of the last summer before their wedding, Andy took on the not insignificant task of restoring the house to a livable condition.  On top of leveling the floor, replacing rotted sill plates, and repairing decayed wall studs, he had to remove all the old windows and install new ones.  New insulation, new wiring, new plumbing, a new roof, heating system, and air conditioning,   The old bathroom was usable but barely, so that would be replaced, as would the kitchen.

Of course, the whole place would need new siding.

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Madison’s father, John, lent a hand when he could, as did I.  Some of Andy’s friends helped and the brothers (that’s what we call our six sons) offered to come home to lend brains and brawn, but Andy’s youngest brother, Patrick, assisted more than anyone.

Despite the number of those willing to assist, at times it seemed to be Howard, Howard, and Fine…The Three Stooges.

The Three Stooges Remodel a House.

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We planned on enclosing the space over the old concrete patio to make a bedroom.  However, when we tried to brace up the roof that had been built after I had moved away years ago, we got a surprise.  The patio roof was shaped like that over the rest of the house so we assumed it was made of trusses.  It wasn’t.  I told Andy how to brace it, and to double-check where the joists were but there was a breakdown in our communication…the part about checking where the joists were.  Without climbing into the space beneath that roof the support braces were put up and the old support posts were knocked out.  The creaking and popping of nails pulling out of wood gave Andy and his friends who were helping him a little warning.  Get to safety!

In this day of video recorders in cell phones the sound of the nails also alerted the friend to record what was going on as the roof pulled away from the rest of the house and collapsed onto the patio.  Andy was a safe distance away so wasn’t hit by any of the flying debris, but he was close enough that he was almost brained by a flying bird that lost its home with the collapse.

As the excitement faded, my son showed his sense of humor with a nervous laugh, then, “O-o-o-oh crap.”

Yeah.

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I helped them pull out the support post that still held up some of the roof then we added the roof to the pile of debris from the remodel.

Undaunted, Andy and Madison formulated plans for a new bedroom that increased the square footage of the house by about 1/3.  That would pretty much round the place out, except for one thing.

The roof.

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Now, remember, this house was not new when we bought the farm in the 1970s.  I suspect it was AT LEAST 20 years old then but can’t be sure.  I do have a friend who used to visit there in the 1960s so I know it was there then.  Let’s just say it was at least 60 years old during our remodel.

I say all that to explain why the new trusses I ordered didn’t fit.  Well, more precisely, they were just different enough that finishing the roof would have looked, well, wonky.  I don’t blame the company I ordered them from; they used the measurements I gave them.  I figure it had to do with the difference in the dimensions of the lumber.  Most carpenters will tell you there’s a big difference between modern, dimensional, lumber and the old true-dimension lumber.  When the house was build a 2×4 was two inches by four inches.  Now it is 1 ¾ inches x 3 ¾ inches.

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Replacing the roof after framing in the new bedroom was only a two day project.  Well, it SHOULD have been.  When we started to put the new trusses up we found that wasn’t so.

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Our two oldest sons are true math whizzes.  Don’t get me wrong, they can all do math, and Andy can teach it very well, but those two LOVE math.  They tell each other math jokes that nobody else understands.  Both have memorized Pi to some amazing place, for fun.  They are both in the top 5% or so of mathematicians in the world.

So it should come as no surprise to you that they disagreed about the proper way to figure the correct dimensions, angles, etc. on the trusses so they could be remade.  As I said, they are so smart that they came up with different ways to figure it all out; they eyeballed them instead and got them perfect.

While they were finishing the modification of the trusses, other brothers were removing the roof from the original house.  I went to get the corrugated sheet metal to cover the roof with and that’s when the weather caught us by surprise…and ruined the ceiling tiles and the sheet rock that we had not planned to replace.

Until now.

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The brothers got the roof fixed and applied the corrugated steel.  The little house roof was so steep that a little ingenuity was required.  Imagine a couple young men with ropes around their waists.  The rope was thrown over the peak of the roof and down to the yard where it was tied to the bumper of J.B.’s pickup.

While they were at it they reroofed our house too.

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Eventually Andy got the house finished in time for the couple to get married and move in.  They enjoyed the little house for the first two years of their love story, and even added our delightful little Harper Grace to the family.

All this came about because The Three Stooges decided to remodel a house.

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

 

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(above) A short video I put together to show what we did.

(below) I thought you might get a kick out of seeing our bad luck and how we rebounded from it.