The overbuilt eyesore of a ‘loft’ — that wasn’t even attached to the house structure anywhere — came down! Our goal for a two day mini-vacation was to get the loft down and then do various other projects in the cabin. Thanks to shoddy construction by the loft-builder, we had it down by noon on day one! It was pouring rain all day, so we spent the rest of the day having a picnic indoors, enjoying the fact that there were no leaks anywhere (!), and cutting out the bathroom flooring so we can fix what lies beneath. On day two, it had stopped raining so we cleaned up, moved lumber, de-nailed flooring, and laid out tape lines to figure out some design details. A very productive couple of days, and we also enjoyed going out to dinner and staying at the Inn about a mile up the road from the cabin during the interceding evening.
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- Before: the loft looked like aliens flew in and dropped a giant, oversized deck in the middle of the house.
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- All the lumber was oversized, reducing headroom in the loft, and most of the joist hangers were under-sized.
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- Even better, only a couple of the joist hangers were actually nailed into the joists! They were nailed (a little) to the ledger, but the joists just popped right out when lifted.
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- Premature celebration: after the easy removal of all the joists and the front (completely flying!) ‘wall’, the back ledger was a real pain in the bum to remove. All the nails went there, and we had to dig them out with cat claws and hammers to pull the oversized board.
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- Done! All the extraneous mess removed, and vacuumed too (hence, the haze. Yes, we had masks and a hepa filter on the vac).
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- The perfect siting of the house means the sun comes all the way across the living room in winter. In summer, it barely gets onto the front porch. LOVE old construction that involved forethought.
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- Then we cut out the flooring in the bathroom (and de-nailed it for future use). We have some floor re-framing to do, then a new sub floor on top of the old, compromised boards.
