It’s com­mon to hear that some­one has launched into a remodel of a house and will take it “down-to-the-studs”. “It’s got good bones” they might say, attempt­ing to assure you (and them­selves) that it will be a thor­ough makeover a bit more than just skin deep.

We clung to the belief that we would be able to do the same with our lit­tle bun­ga­low. Some­how the dis­ap­pear­ing dry­wall would only reveal the solid virtues of our mod­est dwelling. Instead we got triage with mul­ti­ple com­pound frac­tures and lin­ger­ing thoughts of hou­sana­sia. The afore­men­tioned bath­room addi­tion we dis­cov­ered set the stage for what was to come.

Soon-to-disappear kitchen wall

And it came in the form of the trou­ble­some kitchen wall. We knew that was no con­crete base­ment wall due to the vis­i­ble con­tours of the extant struc­ture. The build­ing depart­ment had said if the wall gets mod­i­fied to remove the win­dows we wanted out then  there must be a shear­wall in its place. (That seis­mic zone again!) But with­out even a footer and stemwall there could hardly be a shear­wall. So we deftly side­stepped the issue by pre­tend­ing it didn’t exist. Until it did .

With a bit of barter credit in my back pocket I called in my skilled and expe­ri­enced friend Tom Hughes to prod me along. As it turned out, his assis­tance was as valu­able for the prod­ding as for his con­sid­er­able expe­ri­ence as a builder. And pin­ning the blame on him for what had dis­ap­peared when Lisa returned home each day came in handy as well. At the end of his three days at the site, the front porch had also disappeared.

So now we race to get the lit­tle naked house roofed and dry before the Ore­gon rains begin in earnest. A lot more fid­dling with non-parallel, non-plumb, non-square (and prob­a­bly even out-of-round some­where) to get sheath­ing on the rafters. We did have the good for­tune of recy­cling quite a bit of fir tongue and groove from the porch deck and some of the inte­rior sub­floor to plank our eaves with. Then comes the rain­screen sid­ing so we can get inside before things get too cold as well.