I’m always in trouble around here. It seems I have a lot of unfinished projects. And my husband has to comment on everything.
Jesse - “Why is there newspaper taped to the wall?”
Kristen - “Because I was hanging the pictures that have been sitting in our bedroom forever.”
“So you are hanging newspaper instead?”
“No, you cut the newspaper to the size of the frames so you can tape them up and get an idea of where the frames go to hang them.”
Jesse – “I don’t want to hang the frames with the old pictures in it.”
Kristen – “I don’t plan to keep the picture, but want to get the frame on the wall so it looks right.”
“So you are going to hang an empty frame.”
“No I will be hanging the frame with the old picture in it and then ordering a new picture.”
“Yeah like that is going to happen.”
“So you are telling me you don’t want me to hang the frames anymore, you would rather have them laying back in the sitting room?”
While we are out for a walk this evening we talk about whether we should finish the frame hanging or remove the column in the kitchen. I told Jesse I should be able to finish the frame hanging myself, so let’s attack the column in the kitchen.
This next conversation I will label us as Person 1 and Person 2, you can guess who is who.
Person 1 – “Are we sure this isn’t supporting anything? The beam is running in the weak axis, but there are two porcelain tubs right above this wall.”
Person 2 – “It shouldn’t be, the floor joists should be supporting the tubs and the floor joists are two feet above this wall running from the side of the house to the load bearing wall in the middle of the house. This column should only be holding up the soffit for the ceiling, and hopefully it’s not even doing that.”
Person 1 – “I’ll remove the first post and then we can see if the second post buckles under the load.”
Person 2 – “Ok.”
Person 1 – “Do you know how pissed I’m going to be if I have to work on putting back in a column this weekend when I had other plans.”
Person 2 – chirp chirp
Person 1 – “What are you going to do about the hole in the floor when the column gets removed?”
Person 2 – “Put in a piece of wood.”
Person 1 – “Where are you going to get that?”
Person 2 – “From up my arse…apparently.”
Person 1 – “And why are we even removing this column, what are you going to do differently in here?”
Person 2 – “Move the kitchen table over so that we can replace the sliding door that leaks air and is ancient, once the door gets replaced buy a new fridge and put it where the old sliding door used to be.”
Person 1 – “You are NOT putting the kitchen table on the carpet. I’m so sick of starting projects that we can’t finish, look at the dining room. Those columns have sat unfinished for almost 2 years because we can’t finish them till we replace the floor, and we can’t replace the floor until we make the opening wider when we are redoing the kitchen.”
Person 2 – “What do you want me to say?”
Person 1 – “Here goes.”
First column gets removed.
Person 1 – “Does it look like the wall is sagging?”
Person 2 – “Can’t really tell.”
Person 1 – “You can’t look up close, look from far away.”
Person 2 – “Still can’t tell.”
The second column doesn’t move very easily when trying to remove it.
Person 1 – “Are we sure this isn’t supporting the wall above?”
Person 2 – “It would be really crappy construction if it was, I don’t think it is.”
Person 1 – “Okay here goes with the sledge hammer, hold on to the 2x under this wall in case the wall falls down.”
Sledge hammer successfully gets second 2x column out of the frame and thankfully, the wall stays up. Now we have a nice big opening in the kitchen, and some trim work to finish everything up. Maybe we will actually get to that this weekend, or save it for a few years.
And in case you were wondering, here is the lovely hole in the flooring.
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