The weekend it rained in the kitchen.

The sound was somewhere between a slap and a snap. I couldn't place it as I slowly woke up Saturday morning. But as I swung my feet over the edge of the bed it dawned on me: falling water. I was hearing a leak in the kitchen. That propelled me out of bed rather quickly. 

I stared at the pool of water covering the kitchen floor without understanding what I was looking at. Back to the bedroom for my glasses. Returning I could see the ripples reflecting on the kitchen ceiling. This was a lot of water.

I ran upstairs, convinced that Jamie had left a tap on over night. But he wasn't home. Pascal heard me roar back down the stairs and was already getting dressed as I started shouting "GET UP! We've got a problem!". 

We stared at the water raining through our kitchen ceiling and started making guesses as we grabbed towels and a soup pot to catch the water. Broken pipe? Toronto had just experienced a serious deep freeze followed by a major thaw. Toilet malfunction? Leak from the poorly built addition caused by melting snow? Hole in the roof? In the second floor bathroom there was moisture showing on the exposed brick wall and we could hear water dripping behind the shower. The problem had to be on the roof. 

Pascal had the ladder up and was naming the issue as he climbed: ice dam. After Toronto's holiday ice storm, followed by the deep freeze and now a +6C melt, ice had formed along the edge of the roof and was preventing melt water from reaching the eaves troughs. Water had pooled around and eventually underneath the flange around the venting pipe. Essentially the melt water from the roof was draining into the house, from top to bottom, with a brief stop in the kitchen ceiling.  Pascal knocked out the ice and created a channel for the water to escape. The interior rain stopped almost immediately but not in time to save 2/3's of our kitchen ceiling.

Over the last month we've worked on finishing the second floor of Peace Flag House. When the leak started we were mere days away from a complete house. Now we were ripping down soggy drywall and pulling out wet insulation. Needless to say, it's was hard to find the "zen of renovating" whilst pulling apart our own hard work from the past few years.

In order to prevent further damage and to stop any opportunity for mold growth we needed dehumidifiers and fans immediately. I started texting anyone that might have either of those items. The recipients of my texts started texting their friends. By Sunday we had three dehumidifiers, a heater, two fans, labourers helping pull down drywall and cleaning up, all our meals prepared for us, Relish taken care of, a bottle of rum and a bottle of wine. We also received many expressions of sympathy, a room to stay in if needed, offers for more labour and lots of hugs.

 

I think that sometimes the zen of renovating isn't in the renovation work at all. Pascal and I have worked on Peace Flag House for four years now, moving from task to task, slowly rebuilding the house from the brick up. It can feel like renovations are all about hammer drills and dry wall. But this weekend's disaster reminded me that it's actually about people.  

Over the last four years we've had a lot of help from the folks around us. Family, friends and neighbours have been instrumental in the growth of Peace Flag House. People have brought us food, walked our dog, shared their knowledge, offered their expertise, hauled out garbage, hung drywall, painted drywall, lifted floors, laid floors, pulled wire, connected toilets, reconnected toilets, lifted lots of heavy items and sanded walls. People have shared meals with us when our only furniture were lawn chairs and helped me wash the dishes with the garden hose in the backyard. From the moment we began this project there has been a continuous stream of people supporting us.

Sunday evening we had the ceiling drywall down and the mess cleaned up. I was describing the past 48 hours to a friend as we when shared a much earned drink when  the washing machine sprung a leak, spilled its water all over the kitchen floor and I seriously began to wonder if we had been cursed. Our friend didn't hesitate; she grabbed towels, mopped up the floor, unloaded the cupboards and poured more rum.  

In that moment, when yet another problem erupted, I found my zen again.

The trick was in remembering that we have never been alone in this.

The Zen of Renovating: Living in the Present

As 2012 slid into 2013 Pascal and I began work on the renovation of the second floor of Peace Flag House. We moved our lives onto the first floor, cramming a giant desk and my spinning wheel into the living room. For the first time in three years we slept in a bedroom with drywall. It took a few nights to get over the claustrophobia.

First floor kitchen.

Basement apartment Kitchen.

Renovating the first floor from start to finish was over a year in the making. It turned out beautifully.

The basement apartment took another year. Once again, gorgeous.

We told ourselves that the second floor would move along at lightening speed.  It's all finishing, no structural work.  Besides, we've learned so much. Our skills have leapfrogged forward. We were lean, mean, total renovation machines.

Oh the realities of ignorance.

Renovating a house, I have discovered, is a process of discovery and an exploration of interlocking pieces and overlapping systems. Taking down walls, lifting floors, removing ceilings is like walking back into history, where you uncover years of decision making very different from you own. Why did this furnace vent stop in the middle of the wall? Why was the stove wire just plastered over and not safely stowed in the studs? Why were the joists cut off under the bathtub?

This last one, the floor joists being cut off underneath the second floor bathtub, is a big deal.  Joists hold up the floor.  They run from supporting wall to supporting wall.  They are big pieces of wood required to make sure the flooring you stand on doesn't cave in.  Cutting the joists off underneath a bathtub (which holds a lot of heavy water and humyns) is not recommended because of immutable forces, such as gravity.

Remarkably enough the bathtub had not landed in the kitchen.  We had repaired the joists when we did the kitchen ceiling but a 100 years of gravity meant there was still a dip in the second story floor.  A slow moving slope from the middle of the house to the bathroom at the back, ending with a dip totaling 3 inches. This was a seriously uneven floor.

While we certainly realized this dip existed while installing the kitchen ceiling, somehow in the past 3 years we had forgotten (willfully?) about its existence. 

Packing the joists.

Too move forward on the second story meant levelling the floor, which meant a/ pulling up the old hardwood (recycled into a friend's cottage), b/ lifting the old sub floor, and c/ levelling the joists, also called 'packing the joists'.

To achieve of all this meant pulling out the bathtub, vanity, and toilet.  As well as, lifting a layer of self-leveling cement and exposing the joists.  While the floor was open we might as well move a couple of furnace vents and improve the sound insulation between the floors.  Since getting at the joists meant taking out a few 'small' walls we might as well change lighting fixture locations and move a plug, rebuild closet walls, remove framing to reveal exposed brick, rebuild a bathroom wall, remove the old railing and newel post, remove the carpet runner on the stairs and raise the headers on the doorways.


So much for lightening speed.
Having to back track doesn't feel like moving forward, even when it's your only option.

"Why, oh why, did THEY decide to cut off the joists?", I moaned.
I had no idea.  Neither did Pascal.  I couldn't know who or why they made this decision.  I couldn't know the circumstances under which this decision was made. 


All I could know was that their decision had produced my present reality.  Although frustrating, I couldn't change the past and put the joists back together.  The only place I could effect change was in my present reality.  I could only work on improving the present, which meant packing that floor with giant, individually cut shims that brought it up to level and relaying a solid sub floor.


One step forward, three steps back. Starting the second story renovations by pulling up good flooring and sub flooring felt like getting pushed back into the early days of our renovation when we had no shower and no kitchen.  It was frustrating because there was nothing we could do to make the joists be uncut and the floor un-sloped.


That's the rub with the past; it can't be changed.  However, our efforts to make change in the present, to make things better, to heal what was broken (whether floor joists, or a life, or a system), have huge and lasting impacts.  Now is where we can change our patterns, fix mistakes, try again, and alter our contexts.

The result of our efforts? A solid, non-squeaking, level floor easily capable of holding us up.

 

The Back Story

Peace Flag House has a back story that Pascal and I love to tell. 

Before the Peace Flag this house had a little bit of a hoarding problem. We bought it without actually being able to see the interior. It was closed to viewing because of liability issues but the bones looked good and I trusted my partner.

We gutted the entire interior (I say this in past tense but in reality the process continues two years in). During the first few months the rickety kitchen cabinets came down and the taped-shut toilets were removed. We held demolition parties to pull down the lathe and plaster walls. Friends, brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters all came with amazing fortitude and helped. Three false ceiling came out of the kitchen, numerous wiring mistakes were beheld (nails through stove wire - yikes!) and we discovered that the dip in the kitchen ceiling was the result of a floor joist under the upstairs bathtub being removed to make way for plumbing.

When we moved in February 1st, 2010 we had exactly one functioning toilet, one sink that drained into a bucket, half of the insulation, a hot plate, a fridge, and a microwave. We had no shower, no kitchen sink, no walls around the toilet and no table. It was urban camping complete with one spoon and one bowl each.

It was rough but livable, especially after we managed to purchase a small fire pit for the backyard. After spending so much time looking at houses we couldn't kick the open-house habit. A couple of weeks after we moved in we visited an open-house down the street. It had teal green walls and soft-core porn for decoration. The real estate agent looked embarrassed just standing in the living room. But the seller was moving to Mexico and willing to part with his portable fire pit. Suddenly all of that 100 year old hickory lathe stacked in the backyard looked very useful. We spent the rest of the winter eating a lot of sausages cooked over a hickory fire, wrapped in old sleeping bags, and keeping our beer chilling in the snow banks.

The work on the house continued non-stop all winter, spring and summer. Many wonderful friends came to help us. We paid them in food, drink and a chance to learn some new skills. Many wonderful family members came to teach us the details of plumbing, wiring, drywalling, mudding and more. We paid them in food, drink and sometimes the 'family rate'.

That first summer I did the dishes in the bathtub, in the shower, on the back porch with a garden hose, throwing the dishwater over the new garden. Pascal worked incredibly hard on the main floor until 8 months later we installed a working kitchen sink.

Throughout all of this work our door was open to community. Our first weekend in the house hosted out-of-towners in sleeping bags. It was difficult at times to organize privacy in the bathroom (holler before you go upstairs!) and to do all the dishes with a garden hose, especially when larger crowds arrived for the G20 protests. But no one really seemed to mind the lack of couches or coffee tables. And late night campfires and back porches full of sleepy heads in sleeping bags made it worthwhile.

It's the beginning of 2012 now, the main floor is done (complete with dishwasher and couch!) and the second floor continues to be open studs. We're working on the basement where there will be a lovely two-bedroom apartment hopefully ready for (late) spring. I'm typing this on a computer that is increasingly covered in drywall dust. In just a moment I'll put this down to help Pascal hang a large piece of drywall.

Peace Flag House continues to grow.