Life Is A Carnival, And I Live In A Tent. So Do You

I can’t see the forest for the poles

Well, maybe not a tent. A tent can be elegant. No self-respecting bedouin would put his tent on the back of his garage. He lived out front and the camel went in the back. No Snout Tent for him. A bedouin encampment could be pretty posh. You can’t afford one real wool hand knotted Persian carpet, while some really sunburned guy with nothing but a camel, a copper pot, a pistol, and a bad attitude could afford to make his Levantine wigwam out of dozens of them. He knew comfort. Bedouins were so famous for putting it up and taking it down in a trice that even Longfellow knew about it, even thought there weren’t all that many Arabs in Portland, Maine for him to observe.

And the night shall be filled with music,   
  And the cares, that infest the day,   
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,   
  And as silently steal away.

But you don’t think of your house as a tent. You think of it as a big, immovable solid object, like your mortgage. You don’t want to live in a tent, except when you’re on vacation. Even then, your tent is probably a Motel 6 without premium cable so you know you’re roughing it. The idea that a house would move around, and breathe in and out, and care about the humidity more than a mother-in-law in the summer, bugs you. That’s why you probably think you can jack up your house like a car with a flat tire. The house just weighs more, so all you need is a bigger jack, right?

No, it’s more like a tent. Let’s go down in the basement. Put a jack anywhere. Big jack. Very big jack. Start jacking. Does the house go up? No. At least, not in the way you might think. It’s closer to pushing a tent pole up in the middle of a big top’s canvas roof. The house doesn’t like it, and groans and pops and shifts and makes even stern men wait outside a while when you start cranking or pumping or whatever. The house proper doesn’t go up. A bit of it goes up, right over the spot you’re lifting, drags what it can with it, like swimming in a dress. If you’re lucky, you get the house to bulge a little higher in that one spot. Or, more likely, it punches a hole going up, or punches a hole in the ground. The previous occupants were forever pitching these tents in the basement, to little effect.

I counted ten aftermarket adjustable steel columns in play in the basement. They are misidentified at every store and website as Lally columns, or basement jacks, or both. They are neither. A Lally is a steel tube filled with concrete that acts as an improved substitute for structural wooden posts, invented by John Lally about a century ago. They are cut to length and are not adjustable. Every single one of the steel columns in my basement were mislabeled further by the manufacturer, and labeled 8′-1″ , which is 97 inches if you can count and read and write. Of course they’re actually 81 inches, which is 6′ – 9″, but hey, what’s sixteen inches between friends, other than a really scary porno? The label also shouts: APPROVED BY HUD, but then again so was the mortgage on every foreclosed house in the nation. Let’s move on.

There’s an adjustable plate at the top of the columns that you raise by turning a screw. It’s just meant to allow you to adjust the height of the whole mess, but everyone sees “jack” on the label and figures they can pick up the house with it. Then they bang on the little metal rod they give you to turn the screw until it’s bent like a scimitar. Then they give up, and buy another one. And another one. Et cetera.

Here’s what you get for your trouble, generally:

The former denizens tried making a huge beam out of 2x6s, which is a waste of time and lumber and nails, then they put a steel column on each end, and no doubt clapped their hands together theatrically and made the Solomonic statement so common to amateur house repairers everywhere: Don’t worry, concrete is strong.

Well, yes. A weightlifter is strong, but that doesn’t mean you can shoot him with a deer rifle without him at least complaining about it. Strong how, compared to what is the operative question. This column, for instance, one of our bevy of  things standing around doing not much, as if I’d purchased a Post Office, had punched a hole in the thin concrete dust cap that a cellar floor actually is, not the bedrock everyone assumes it represents. If I hadn’t come along and bought this dump, its foot would’ve been hearing muffled Mandarin soon.

So there were ten or so fairly expensive adjustable steel columns, all of which I eventually removed, and they probably cost as much as the proper jacks I purchased to actually pick up the house. As I mentioned before, it’s more expensive to try to fix your house than to actually do it.

I ended up making the garage doors out of the 2x6s from that beam I mentioned, so it wasn’t a total loss. Anybody want to buy ten, 8′-1″ Lally columns, er, I mean ten, 81″ metal poles?

(to be continued)

Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends, I’m So Glad You Could Attend, Stay Outside, Stay Outside!

OK, here’s where I admit embarrassing things.

Well, additional embarrassing things, I mean. I had to change my wife’s flat tire a day after mocking my dear departed dad’s flat tire method. That’s pretty embarrassing. But it’s supernatural, of course. No one’s really embarrassed when someone on Olympus lobs a lightning bolt at them. It’s considered a kind of flattery: Zeus noticed me enough to smite me! I’m somebody!

No, it’s hitting your thumb with a hammer when a pretty girl walks by that rankles. You know better, and feel sheepish, and the worst part of it is knowing that chicks don’t dig guys with big, purple thumbs all that much. You’re suffering for nothing. It’s the sheepish sort of thing I must admit here: I really didn’t pay all that much attention to how much my house weighs.

That crummy 5-1/2″ x 8-1/2″ scribble on the free pad they gave me at a lumber yard I haven’t visited in five years is all there was to my calculations. There’s an amusing error right in the middle of it. I put a dollar sign where I meant to put a pound symbol, and then wrote lbs after it, too. It’s an understandable mistake. All I was really worried about was money all the time. We were doing this project on less than an Amish person’s clothing allowance. I had money on the brain. I certainly wasn’t going to waste any on a structural engineer.

The former occupants of my house didn’t waste any money on structural engineers, that’s for certain. They wasted money on all sorts of things –ceiling fans, mostly — that was evident. It’s easy to waste money trying to fix your house. It’s actually a lot cheaper to not try, and actually fix the house. Therein lies a lesson. Here’s some of what I was faced with down there:

I know, you can’t make out much in the picture. Believe me, it’s not you. I was standing right there and it didn’t make any sense with your face right in it. It was a Mousetrap Game covered in cobwebs. That was the real problem, not the weight it was holding up.

Back to the greenprints. How’d I come up with 78,750 pounds that needed to be lifted? Well, I’m not a structural engineer. A structural engineer would have said in stamped ink that it was 250,000 pounds, because if he said 78,750, and then I dropped my house on my head, his troubles would just be beginning. It’s lawsuits and women in black on 60 Minutes sobbing and saying that dastardly engineer dropped a house on my husband and now we’re eating dog food thrice daily.  Me, I just say 78,750 because that’s probably plenty, and if I drop my house on my head, my troubles are over. What me worry?

So I drew a rectangle that represented the square footage of the floor that relied on the back wall for support. The house is about thirty feet wide, and the span of the rooms above is about half that, so 30×15= 450 square feet. Remember our engineering lesson? The back wall is a Crushy Thing, and the floors are the Vaguely Bendy Things. But the back wall only carries half the Heavy Thing arrow in this case, because half is carried by the Other Crushy Thing, i.e. : the interior walls that support the other end of the Vaguely Bendy Things. So we have a 50 percent margin for error in our weight calculation. All of the framing is as charred as Satan’s barbecued ribs, so such margins might come in handy.

My house is built strangely in order to make straightforward calculations difficile, never mind the many modifications over the years. There are three floors above the concrete I’m standing on in that picture, and a roof, dontcha know, and they’re framed like a weird lasagna. Some framing goes left to right, and rests on the sidewalls of the house and the main carrying beam, which is the charred thing you see sitting atop that weird steel beam/ lally column cockup I found down there. The other floors go from front to back in the house, so that one end rests on the back wall framing, and the other on post and beam carrying beams and walls spanning the interior of the house. That’s why calculations like these can drive you batty. The floor above my head, with my workshop and all sorts of heavy cast iron things and whatnot doesn’t rely on the rear wall of my house to hold it up. Not one pound. Which is good in one way, because that wall was gone. It’s bad in another, because that means the back of the house, which had slumped almost six inches, had only a passing relationship with the first floor over my head. If I jacked up the back wall, I’d be lifting up the second and third floors, and the roof, but not the floor above the basement.

(to be continued)