I went out of town this past week. NY and CT to participate in the Albany Book Festival and family in CT. A lovely trip in every way. I miss my old Saratoga Springs summers, but now my brother and sister-in-law live in Connecticut so I get to go there whenever I want, not just summers. A tiny bit of leaves were turning colors. And, the book festival was fun and successful.
While I was gone, more progress on the kitchen demo was made. Now, instead of removing walls and concrete, they dug holes for the new foundation. These holes are so deep a human can stand in them and still have a good foot over their head. I made a joke to the construction guys, “This is where we can bury the bodies.” They laughed. Always good to make your construction crew laugh. One guy asked how many bodies was I thinking of and I calculated that instead of standing them up, I could bury more bodies if I could lay them head to toe. I could possibly get two stacks of maybe 7 people each. That’s 14 bodies. I don’t have that many people I need to get rid of, so, if you have someone you need to get rid, now’s your chance before they fill it with concrete next week.
But maybe most interesting of all was when they were digging next to one part of the house that was added on in the 50s they discovered that it has no foundation at all. Well, I mean, unless you count the two inches of flooring under the tile. The floor is essentially floating. At any time, it could have just caved in. Granted, one would only fall about six inches to the dirt underneath it, but still, that would have made a real bummer for the guests staying in that guest room. Not to mention the mess, and possible sprained ankle.
Our construction crew is one we’ve worked with before when we built our ADU in the back, so we joke around a lot. They also saw all the graffiti from the Good Riddance Kitchen party, so they supplied a bit more of their own while they were demoing. And we also found one more bit of graffiti from a previous homeowner from the 70s about the moon landing. In case you can’t read it, I says,
“Land on the Moon
Shepard 5th Man to Walk On
1971 Feb 3 Around Moon
Feb 5 Land on Moon
0114 PST”
While all the graffiti will be removed when this is done, I like having creativity under the surface. We are going to reuse much of the old (back when 2x4s were 2x4s) redwood posts to build an out building, so maybe the essence of the pencil scratchings will still be felt on the property.
All morbid and macabre jokes aside, this week Eber and I kept standing on the pile of dirt surrounding that big hole and we’d say, “It’s going to be so amazing!”
