From pillar to post

The noise that you didn’t hear yesterday – but which I experienced, and for hours, thank you – was the sound of a jackhammer reducing the floor of our basement to rubble. Yes, there were reasons for this, big ones and good ones.

The modest house owned by M and myself is just over a century old, and it has all the ‘character’ and ‘features’ that one might expect of a home of that age. Among them are three support pillars in the basement, wooden posts measuring six inches by six inches by about six and a half feet. I do not know if these pillars are original to the house – that is, if they’re all of a hundred years old. I shouldn’t be surprised, given the condition of the posts where they met not only the floor of the basement, but perhaps even the soil beneath.

The base of the wooden pillars were in varying states of decay from age and contact with moisture. While not at the point of disintegration and collapse, the condition of the supports allowed us to see that unhappy event off in the distance, if you know what I mean. Time for replacements, yes?

Friends and colleagues think that M and I are among that efficient elite of homeowners who identify problems and immediately move to solve them. HA HA HA – er, I mean, no. We’re nothing like that. The idea of replacing the basement supports was more than a year old before we finally decided to act on it. To our credit, at least, we actually did. M identified a contractor, the requisite exchange of signatures and cash took place, and two decent fellows came along yesterday and did what they did.

The piering guys added two adjustable support poles to accompany the three we already had in place (ours were originally placed there to address a squeaking first floor, not to keep the house from collapse). They then knocked out the three wooden columns, then set about jackhammering holes in the floor to accommodate poured cement. Once hardened, the cement will serve as footing for new steel columns.

So now we wait. M wants to keep the newly-retired wooden columns for repurposing. Something arty, no doubt. The piering contractor will show up in a few days to install the permanent steel columns (and to haul away the shattered rubble, we are assured), and we can then move on to the next project on the list.