As I said in the previous post, I learned a lot about being a homeowner from our house on the lake.  When it was built it was meant to be a weekend cabin.  When we purchased it, we intended to live in it full-time.  It was completely furnished with the previous owners cast-off pieces of furniture.  The only pieces that were of any value were an old metal glider and matching chair, a patio table with chairs, a wood heater and a Castro convertible couch.

    We sold everything, with the exception of the above mentioned items, to a guy that had a junk store.  The only name I knew for him was “ol’ big man” and he definitely was that.  He came out in his Dodge pick-up, surveyed the situation and offered us $300.00 for all of it.  Of course he wanted the good stuff, too, but we told him no.  His offer was accepted and he proceeded to load that pick-up with an entire house full of furniture.  I assume he had no intentions of going through a low underpass along the way back to his store because, no lie, that truck was stacked at least twelve feet high.  I sold the wood stove for $150.00 to someone my brother-in-law knew.  A few days before we moved in I drove up to the house just as the previous owner was leaving...with the metal chair that went with the glider.

    There was a significant water leak under the house that the owner was to have fixed before closing.  It wasn’t fixed at all; in fact, it was made worse by his attempts to repair it himself.  Immediately after the closing he took his family on a two week vacation and left us with a house we couldn’t move into.

    Anyway, we managed to move in a couple of months later than we had planned and start living the luxurious lake house life.  I say that sarcastically because the only luxurious thing there was the half acre of poison ivy on the north end of the lot.  Thick and green!  When we moved our first load of furniture in we were overtaken by mosquitoes because we had left the door open during the process.  I distinctly remember my wife saying, “Oh my God, we’ve bought ‘Green Acres’”.  That was an understatement.

    Several years passed and we (I) decided to remove the back porch.  The screened in porch overlooked the lake, but judging from the shabby construction, it was an obvious afterthought by the previous owner.  I got the roof torn off and all of the screen, but the floor was more difficult.  It was about eight feet above the ground and just plain awkward to tear out by myself.  My brother-in-law, Jim, had a great idea.  He said he would bring the farm’s backhoe over and we could use that.  That would make it much easier and it would go a lot faster.

    One Saturday morning he came driving up on the backhoe.  It was a fine piece of equipment.  It had lived out its useful life with the county road department before the farm had bought it at auction.  While you were driving, you had to constantly turn the steering wheel to the left to keep it going straight.  To turn right, you just stopped turning it left.  To turn left you had to turn the wheel left twice as fast.  When you parked it and cut the engine off, the entire thing just sort of wilted until the backhoe bucket and the front end loader bucket were resting on the ground.

    We started tearing off floor joists with Jim on the backhoe and me supervising from above.  There was a patio door that led from the great room out to the porch and I stood there to make sure everything was going to plan.  The demolition was going much faster that I thought it would or perhaps Jim was going much faster than I thought he would...definitely one of the two.  When he got to the part just left of the patio door, the joists were a little more stubborn than the others.  Before I could say “Whoa” the great room wall was moving away from the great room floor.  A large gap of daylight appeared along the baseboard where it met the floor.  I started yelling and waving my arms and Jim stopped immediately.  There was a two or three inch opening between the wall and the floor for about six feet.

    This was obviously an ‘oh shit’ moment that was going to take some quick thinking and ingenuity to fix.  After a brief discussion we came up with the obvious solution.  Jim took the backhoe bucket and pushed the wall back in.  I added a few nails in strategic places and, presto, GOOD AS NEW!

    The rest of the demolition and the subsequent erection of a new back deck went without incident.  The irony was that when we sold the house, the new owners promptly converted the back deck into a porch.