29) Adventures in Candy-Land *

“Do you need some help?”

“At this point Vaness, there really isn’t too much you can help me with. I have to get these joists in and I don’t want you lifting them with your shoulder.”

“So how are you going to get them in place by yourself? They’re really heavy!”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“I feel like I can help you lift them. I know I can’t lift them by myself but…”

“No, it’s fine… I can do it.”

“Ok… well if you change your mind, I will help you. I’m not going to do anything that hurts.”

“Ok…”

That was it. You were stuck in this weird limbo where so much still had to be done but there really wasn’t much that you could do. David still had to put the joists in, the floor jacks, the subfloor, the leveler, and only after that point could you jump back in. Once the floor was done the furring strips could go up, the bead and batten could be installed and then the cleaning and finally painting. But there was unfortunately in regard to the basement project, nothing you could do at the moment.

It was time for side projects. You started with the Christmas gift for your neighbor: a Christmas crown… he was the unofficial “King of Christmas” after all and you knew his wife and daughters would find the crown hilarious… and they did. They had all gotten a kick out of it.

There was also the second hand dresser you had bought months ago, the one that Jackie had sanded the ugly grimey finish off of for you… and then it sat… untouched for far longer than you’d care to admit. Your tolerance of the haphazard looking clothing racks in your room was waning thin and once you got the dresser finished, you could finally start putting your clothing into a better semblance of order. Cleaning and organizing always lowered your stress level.

You spent a day painting and staining the dresser and honestly it came out pretty nice. You weren’t quite sure how you and David were going to lug it up to the bedroom but you knew you’d figure it out.

David spent the next few days cutting and measuring and hefting massive beams into place. The floor pit had been such a project in and of itself and finally getting that giant gaping hole closed up was going to be a game changer. You hated every time you opened up the interior basement door being greeted by that terrifying chasm… an ugly torn gash, a reminder of decades of problems, and another near decade of abandonment and neglect. This wasn’t the sort of thing you could have or want in your family living quarters.

“I feel like I’m going to open up that door one day and see two red eyes staring back at me from that pit,” you told David.

He had laughed it off, and who could blame him, it was a ridiculous thing to even consider… regardless, the pit gave you the creeps and you couldn’t wait to see it gone. You had no clue how David could even bring himself to hop down there willingly, let alone crawl into the darkness, the places where no light had reached for almost a century and a half. The mere thought of it put your nervous system into a tailspin. You were convinced that the world was made up of two types of people: those who thought nothing of climbing into creepy floor pits and those who shuddered at the mere thought… and at this point you were pretty thankful that at least one of you wasn’t the latter.

The real cold had held off for months but that first third of December was a reminder that you were most definitely in upstate New York. Temperatures plummeted. The non heated parts of the church hovered in the 20s and 30s. Rooms that had been comfortable, pleasant really just a few weeks ago were now unbearable… your visible breath a reminder that you needed that basement live-able yesterday.

“How do you know how to do all this?!” You had asked David when the joists were in place and the floor was framed out neatly and more importantly: sturdy.

“I don’t know. I’m just doing it.”

And doing it he was.

When your dresser was done you told him that you were ready for it to go upstairs and for him to let you know when he was ready to help you lug it up two flights of steep narrow stairs. He instead let you know when he had it upstairs and it was ready for you to start using, neatly placed in the bedroom exactly where you had wanted it… almost. You obsessively pushed and pulled it a few inches this way and that way until it was exactly how you wanted it.

“How in the absolute fuck did you get this up here by yourself?! And why didn’t you tell me… I could have helped you?!”

David shrugged.

Sure, the whole half finished bathroom without the door and finished drywall was annoying, but he more than made up for it with the floor and the dresser and everything else he was doing… like laundry and dishes and grocery shopping and cooking. You were very much aware that you had hit the lottery with your husband and even that much more aware that you would have never in a million years been able to renovate this church without him leading the way… without him crawling into a darkened abyss to make your life and your children’s lives infinitely better. You could pee in the open and feel thankful for the opportunity to do so.

At this point you knew that you were a liability when it came to hard labor and so you did what you could on your end to add to the task of making this place a home. If it had not been for the kids your choice of projects to focus on would have been vastly different, but with Christmas coming and not a hint of it inside your home, your youngest asking to decorate… (the last thing you felt like doing to be honest) you knew that this was something that you could actually do.

The whole arrangement was almost comical… David donned a hazmat suit to crawl into the floor pit and pull century old debris out from the depths of the crawlspace while you worked comfortably in the kitchen making six foot tall decorative lollipops to decorated the yard with… the Christmas candy-land you wanted to build for the kids.

You wound pool noodles into spirals of foam that fought you tooth and nail every step of the way. You pinned them into place with bamboo skewers and hot glue.

David lugged decaying wood up from the abyss.

You spray painted your pool noodle spirals outside under the cover of the little portico, getting the colors just so… a little more pink here and a dash of green there.

David added more jacks from underneath the floor after digging a pathway to the tightest, darkest places. He used his father’s collapsible trench shovel that he had brought home from the Vietnam war. Under that floor you had thought, lurked your personal Vietnam.

You applied thick coats of Mod Podge to your colorful pool noodle lollipop tops in the kitchen.

David hauled baskets of ancient coal out from under the floor by the old coal chute.

You sprinkled shimmery iridescent “Buffalo Snow” on your Mod Podged candies and listened to music, cozy and comfortable.

David poured sweat… his face covered in thick dirt and grime save for where his respirator and safety glasses covered him.

You poured more hot tea in your warm robe and slippers.

When all was said and done David had removed several hundred pounds of rotting wooden beams, dragging them through the dirt as he crawled under the floor. He had installed three dozen floor jacks and cranked them up until the floor sat perfectly level. David pulled baskets of old coal out from the crawl space… a few 130 year old metal trays and even a single decaying shoe in very bad shape (you didn’t even want to think about how it had gotten under the floor and where the other might be… or even worse, the feet and person that had worn that shoe could be buried). David lugged 80lb joists after he wrestled them up onto work horses and cut and notched them perfectly to fit into place in the gaping floor pit where he managed to install them and frame out what would be the base of your new floor. He even installed and placed the commercial crawlspace dehumidifier that you had ordered a few weeks ago so that it could begin the long process of drying out 130 years of dank.

You made two six foot tall lollipops, a wreath you had salvaged and decorated after pulling it out of a neighbor’s trash pile, a few giant spray foam cupcakes, and a six foot tall foamboard gingerbread man.

You drove rebar stakes into the frozen ground as best you could, David when he walked by silently took the sledgehammer from you and pounded them in the rest of the way exactly how you wanted, then he helped you slide your lollipop sticks (white PVC pipes) over the metal anchors.

When you decided that the lollipops would look infinitely better if they were just a little more to the left, he didn’t give you any shit about having to pull the now frozen into the ground some two feet down rebar sticks. He went inside and came out with a blowtorch and some wood and a drill to make a hole in the wood and use it as a lever to help hoist the rebar out of the ground after softening the area with the torch.

“Are you absolutely sure that this is where you want them?” He had asked as he held the lollipops here and there on different spots on the frozen front lawn, and when you were certain, he drove the stakes into the ground… again.

A few days later your neighbor, the wife of the Christmas crown recipient texted you to let you know that she was amazed at how much YOU got done, how nice the giant candy and wreath looked in the front.

You thanked her and later laughed with David… “It’s a good thing at least one of us is doing something around here…”

Your soft wife life was on full display in the front yard for in the form of giant glittering candy for the whole town to see… his backbreaking, filthy work, would soon be sealed up forever under the floor and no one save you, and a handful of people would ever be privy to what he had done… and luckily you were both able to see the humor in that.

He was the foundation.

You were just making it presentable.

You got the credit and you both thought that was absolutely fucking hilarious.

Because it was… and you both knew early on that if you were going to get through a 130 year old 7,000 square foot church restoration in one piece, that you had better have a good fucking sense of humor.

My lollipops, cupcakes and gingerbread man… It’s a good thing I get so much done! Lol.

Left to right: “Gingy” my six foot tall foam board gingerbread man waiting by the front door for his yard stakes. A close up of my giant cupcakes. We used “Buffalo Snow” for the sugary effect, broken crayons for sprinkles, spray foam for the ‘cake’, an old Christmas tree ornament cut in half for the cherry, and salvaged plastic plant pots for the base. Another picture of “Gingy” with the giant cupcakes.

David, the real hero lifting the heavy commercial dehumidifier into the floor pit.

Top row, left to right: the floor pit prior to any of the repairs. David hefting the dehumidifier into the pit (middle and right). Bottom row, left to right: The floor pit joist fitting and before it was widened to add more bracing. The floor pit after all the joists were installed and David framed it out (middle and right).

This is after David finished framing everything out. Notice the three metal trays he found under the floor (you’ll see the shoe in one of the trays) and some coal we decided to keep. At the end I realized that the far end of the joist had not been secured yet.

Another video showing the framing David did.

This part of the floor process was slow going. David was having to do everything by himself, each time the wooden joists had to be moved he’d half to rearrange the saw horses and set up clever ways to hold the wood in place for cuts and installation. There was also the issue of the floor jacks. We initially purchased a dozen but soon realized that wasn’t going to be nearly enough at which point we had to order another dozen before David could fully attach the joists to the floor and so we were waiting a while on those to come in. We couldn’t secure anything until the floor was level. I was really impressed that when all was said and done, the floor that had been noticeably sagging was perfectly level.

Since then David had to order and install another dozen floor jacks to the other side of the basement and my guess is that by the time it’s all said and done, we’ll probably need at least two dozen more for a total of five dozen floor jacks. Yeah… the floor was that fucking terrible.

I said to David just last night that I am so incredibly thankful that we didn’t see this place in person before we put in the offer and sold our home… “Because you never in a million years would have bought this place?” He said and he was spot on. I don’t think I would have thought we could do any of this… I’m still questioning how we’re doing all this, lol but I am so thankful we took the leap.

Right now the floor is completely sealed. David put in all of the subfloor and then we wound up having to pour floor leveler. You can tell from the videos and some of the pictures just how many layers of old flooring we had to contend with. On top of that what made things even more tricky was that after we removed several inches of plaster from the walls, there was a 2-8” gap in between the old existing wood floor and the newly bare stone walls. Figuring out how to bridge that gap took a lot of brainstorming. When David finally poured the leveling cement we had a huge area to cover. We started with four bags and quickly realized that wasn’t even going to put a dent in what needed to be leveled. We have since poured an additional 16 bags for a total of over a half a ton of floor leveler.

Before the leveler was poured we had also decided that although we didn’t want to cover the stone walls back up, that on the south wall of the basement we didn’t really have a choice but to at the very least cover the bottom of the wall for aesthetic purposes. That was a whole other issue to contend with. Whatever we decided on it had to be done in such a way that it would be impervious to moisture so that we would be stuck with moldy rotting walls in a few years. We wound up doing a lot of research to find a feasible solution and eventually came across specially designed furring strips made specifically for our type of application. The strips are designed to channel moisture down and away from the wall and into the crawlspace where hopefully any new moisture will be quickly dried out with the new commercial dehumidifier.

The dehumidifier has been an absolute game changer. It’s incredibly quiet and has made a noticeable difference. When we started work in the basement the humidity levels hovered around a damp 80% even after the demolition was complete. Now the walls are completely dry and I’m happy to report that the humidity is a much more comfortable 50% even when it’s pouring rain outside.

We still have a ways to go down here, but for the majority of the basement (the laundry room and what will be a future full bathroom is a whole other story for a whole other time) we are over the worst of this project. Now it’s going to be installing the bead and batten, sanding any rough spots on the floor, spackling the walls, fixing some trim and a small partition of wall on the west side by the basement’s interior entrance, removing old screws and oddly positioned pieces of wood and then finally we can clean the absolute shit out of this place one final time before we paint the walls and floor. At that point we can move down here. We will still have to address the windows and the fucked up stone sills (we plan on building forms and pouring new concrete sills) as well as adding a doggy door to one of the existing windows so that our dog has access to the fenced in yard which will enable us to take longer day trips without having to run home to let him out.

It’s crazy to think that the majority of the backbreaking work we have done down here over almost the last six months will be covered up… no one will know how long it took us to remove the eight tons of crap and plaster we took off the walls. No one will know how hard it was to push all that shit up hill in the 90 degree heat over the past summer. No one will see all the joists and the jacks and the floor leveler and the subflooring. We are toying with the idea of eventually adding plaques around the church (some visible, some hidden until the next round of renovations might be made some very distant time in the future by her new owners one day). These plaques would serve as evidence of what we’ve done, not so much out of ego (maybe a tiny bit) but rather because we are constantly asking ourselves when we think different projects and renovations may have been completed by previous owners. In a lot of cases knowing this would have made a lot of our work much easier as well as satiating our never ending curiousity about this historic place we now call home. It’s not only important for us to restore this beautiful place but to document the journey as one of the previous owners had done. She deserves the documentation.