Blogs are strange things to me. I was resistant to home computing for so many years (despite a career in technology that goes back to the mid-1980′s) that I didn’t even know what a blog was until my mother explained it to me a few years ago. And then I was suspicious of blogs – they screamed “look at me!”, a cry of wolf if I ever heard one. Little by little, though, blogs won me over. For one thing, they have taken over the Internet. For another, my personal diaries scream “look at me!”, even if only to myself, and I ultimately simply couldn’t resist trying myself out on a global stage. Still, they are strange. If nobody is looking at my blog, does it really exist? And if I am writing and nobody is looking does that mean that what I have to say simply isn’t interesting?
But what does that matter, really? I don’t know if I’m a better writer when I’m posting on my blog, but my experiment with this blog opened my mind up in ways that writing in my diary never really did. It’s easier to edit, for one thing. Easier to search through. Easier to type, I guess, than to write something out longhand.
At any rate, what I want to write about today is the state of our house.
When I left off writing in this blog several weeks ago my health was steadily improving. Ultimately, I lost 15 pounds after I stopped taking all my prescriptions. My asthma improved dramatically. My GERD disappeared. No more being light-headed, being dizzy, having such a dry mouth that I couldn’t swallow, having heart palpitations, having such a strong startle response that it impeded my ability to do everyday things. No more paranoia or hypomania or depression. It was amazing.
In fact, the only remaining problem was asthma and allergies. I would being feeling OK and then, as soon as I lay down in bed at night – wam! wheezing galore! And there was simply something about our bedroom that seemed oppressive to me. I didn’t really trust that bedroom. I felt certain something lurked in the ceilings, or behind the walls. Something that was triggering my asthma.
Pre-remodel Master Bedroom
Pre-remodel Master Bedroom
So one weekend several weeks ago we moved out of that bedroom and began the process of demolition. We tore the drywall off the walls in the bathroom, closet, and dressing area and discovered that the plumbing to the bath had, at some point, leaked. The leak had been fixed but nothing had been done about the woodwork that had gotten wet. The base plate for the partition wall behind the plumbing was covered with mold and was beginning to rot. Water had also leaked from the shower spray behind the tiles around the window, causing more mold on the framing around the bath.
Immediately following our discovery, I got sick. I wrote about being sick in my last post.
I’m certain I had a virus because I was running a fever and because all of my joints (and especially my back and the back of my neck) ached. On the other hand, it also felt like a severe allergic reaction… that lasted for weeks. I was too run down to dust and vacuum and that was making everything worse – although, weirdly, my asthma was fine the whole time. My mother came over last week and, bless her heart, cleaned house for me. She can’t imagine how much I appreciated that or how helpful it was.
Thus I was quite reluctant to proceed with our master bedroom remodel. Because the big remaining demolition had the potential to start an asthma attack that could send even a healthy youngster to the hospital: we had to remove the ceiling. We had to remove it because a previous owner had attempted to repair a crack that ran down the entire middle of the bedroom ceiling with roofing nails, wood putty, and spackle, and popcorn texture was falling off on to the floor (and underneath the texture were tell-tale signs of an old leak of some kind).
We toyed with the idea of hiring someone to remove it. We toyed with simply covering it up – which is what we very nearly did. The problem wasn’t removing the drywall, it was the old blown-in insulation laying on top of it, most of which had turned to a fine dust over the past 40 years.
And yet, with finances dictating our direction we couldn’t afford to hire someone, and I couldn’t imagine trying to explain to a potential future home buyer why we decided to cover up a mess rather than repair it.
And then my husband, my hero, stepped in. Late Saturday afternoon he went down to Home Depot and rented a drywall lift. We donned toxic dust respirators, protective coveralls, and long gloves. We dragged out Mom and Dad’s old shop vac, and bought a box of extra-strength, 52-gallon construction trash bags. He climbed up the laddar, and the job began.
David would stand on top of the ladder with his head and shoulders in the attic, and I would hand him an empty bag. He used an empty dust pan to scoop the old insulation in to the bag until it was too full for him to hold any longer, and then I turned on the shop vac and held it on my shoulders so he could vacuum out the remaining dust from that section of drywall. And then we would take that section of drywall down. While he scooped the next bag I vacuumed the dust and debris off the floor. We finished removing the ceiling in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
What we found was eye-opening. In fact, before we even got very far I climbed the ladder to remove the vent cover from the air vent that feeds in to the master bedroom ceiling, only to discover that it was covered with mold. Once we got the first piece of ceiling down and David was able to take a good look around that part of the attic (which is not accessible via the rest of the house), we discovered the source of the “leak” on the ceiling: a large area that had been used like a toilet by a visiting possum. The area, which included both the wiring for our ceiling light fixture and the contaminated air vent, was about 2′x4′ and was filled with feces and urine. The urine had soaked through the drywall. It appeared to be quite old, as the feces (which was a lot like dog poop) was completely desiccated. As we continued removing drywall and made our way towards the dressing area we found a place where a rather major water leak has occurred in the roof. While the leak had been repaired at the roof nobody had bothered doing anything about the water that had found its way in the attic, and the drywall and rafters were covered in mold. Additionally, the possum (or some critter) had chewed all the sheathing off the electrical wires that ran to the light fixtures in the dressing area – light fixtures that just happened to be located directly beneath the leak.
This was a lot of work, I have to say, even though David was the one with doing all the scooping (he wouldn’t let me do it because he was afraid it would be too much for my asthma and allergies). My energy was good on Saturday, but come Sunday morning I was tuckered out. David, however, was just getting started. I helped him hang two 4′x12′ sheets of drywall on the ceiling before I gave out on him. He worked straight through from around noon Sunday until 6am Monday morning and finished hanging all the new drywall in the ceiling. The only break he took was to take our dog to the dog park. He is Superman!!!!
Now, before we started working on the ceiling I had it in my head that I was going to completely seal off the room from the rest of the house, and that I was going to make sure we kept the entire house dusted and vacuumed to keep as clear as possible of the construction dust we were creating – but I didn’t. In fact, our house is now terribly filthy. But you want to know something? Despite all that, I woke up this morning flat on my back in bed – and I wasn’t even wheezing. It was amazing.
We now have a few dozen big bags of filthy old insulation sealed shut and piled on our back porch; we have the old drywall leaning against a wall on our front porch. And we have all that contaminated crap (literally!) out of our master bedroom.
I am proud of us for doing the right thing. For cleaning out instead of covering up. It isn’t perfect, but it proves two things: 1) that DIY’ers can tackle the dirtiest of jobs, and 2) that there is hope for this old house.
I’m looking forward to putting our master bedroom / bath / closet / dressing area back together. But I can’t help thinking about the other rooms in the house with similar problems (we’ve had squirrels in our attic, in a different part of the house, for months). What’s nice is that I no longer feel helpless to deal with the major issues we’ve run in to here.
And maybe that’s what this blog is all about, really- not feeling helpless. If I can take the cover off the afflictions I have bowed to over the years; if I can understand what’s going on underneath my own drywall, then maybe I can fix it. It sure beats the sense of foreboding that staring at a mangled ceiling can bring.
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