Slacker, pt. 2 — House

So in all the work on the kid's room that MIL's been doing, we found some black mold in one of the outer corners of the room. We decided that it's better to be safe than sorry, so we ripped out the sheetrock and found disaster!

A note on the history and construction of our house

We live in a 70-something-year-old brick school house. The folks that we bought it from did a whole lot of work to turn the place into a prety nice home. Then, they moved and rented the house out for years before selling it to us. One of the things they did to the building was lower the ceilings and add two bedrooms in dormers upstairs. The kid's room is in the south dormer.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming

The disaster was that one of the roof trusses (a 2x6 beam) was rotted through so there was only about an inch-and-a-half of semi-solid wood holding it together. And there were carpenter ants. And we could see daylight in gaps between the sides of the dormer and the chimney that's right next to the dormer's side.

My buddy Jacob came over to help with the carpentry since my joinery skills are pretty much non-existent. We cut out a big piece of the truss, replaced it with new wood, sistered it, removed another 2x4 that was starting to rot, replaced it, filled the gaps with some "Great Stuff" expanding foam (that's some great stuff, lemme tell you what!), took out an (the?) ants' nest in a chewed-up nailing header and replaced that, too. Then we killed some chickens (more about that soon).

MIL taught me how to measure and cut sheetrock to fit the gaping holes in the wall, and then she taped and mudded seams. She's up there right now sanding things down, getting ready to paint. I'm writing this while our new dishwasher (courtesy of MIL — thanks again!) works on some dishes. Tonight, we're painting and laying the floor. Tomorrow night, or maybe Saturday morning, we're moving stuff into the room.