Dale-Time

In my last entry I gave some background about how my wife and I came to the decision to move back into the funeral home. I’d like to tell you a little bit about where I am in that project.

Nolen House and former dentist office

When we converted the Nolen house into our family center 20 some years ago we only refurbished the main floor. We put in new carpeting, new furniture, wallpaper and paint and a little work in the kitchen. But we never really touched the upstairs. It had big

Ceiling Cracks

cracks in the plaster ceiling, carpeting that was older than you and me put together and a stairway banister that always leaned a little too much. There were some major dips in the floors where the whole placed had settled years ago. So much that they had cut the doors on the top just to get them to close into the tilted door frames. The bathrooms were in decent shape, with some unique tiling but the plumbing was 80 years old galvanized pipes that were closing up.

Leaning Stairs

At one time the house had been a duplex and had two stairways leading to the upstairs. When they combined the two residences into one they took some walls down and reconfigured a few rooms. I’m sure they didn’t do things to code and there are some ceiling and floor spans that are beyond what their limits should be. Closets were small and oddly configured and the hallways were narrow too. With all that in mind and after watching 20 episodes of “Holmes on Homes” on HGTV, I decided it was best to do it right and take everything down to the studs and start over.

So in the fall I started ripping out carpeting and taking down walls one room at a time. I’d haul/slide the stuff down the stairs and outside to the regular dumpster (distance of about 200 feet). I’d do the work when we were slow or on my days off. I even hooked up a pulley system to drop stuff out of the window in buckets. (I knew all those plastic cat litter containers that I saved would come in handy one day.) After a couple months of that I realized it would take me year just to get it down to the studs working that way. That’s when a few foolish friends said they’d help if I would just schedule a couple days and get a big dumpster. So I thanked them profusely and kissed their toes and promised them a special place in heaven when this was all done. (Beer at the end of a hard days work was also an incentive).

The challenge with a big dumpster is getting it close enough to the house so we could get all the stuff from the 2^nd story into the thing. I thought about building a flexible chute made of 30 gallon plastic garbage cans chained together that I had seen on the internet but once the dumpster arrived a figured out that a wooden chute would be easier. I bought 3 sheets of

The Chute

particle board and used a bunch 2×4’s from the walls I had already taken down and built a 24ft slide that ran from the 2^nd floor window down into the 15yard dumpster. I used the pulley system and a couple helpers to get it up and into place, power nailed some legs on it and I was ready to go.

So for two weekends I got a couple of young strong guys to work for me and we ripped the whole place apart and got 95% of all the plaster and lath down and filled two dumpsters. It sure beat hauling that stuff down the stairs. But I had to do a fair share of dumpster diving to organize all the demolition stuff to make sure I got full use of the whole dumpster. Now that I can see the whole space it’s time to get some construction folks in there and tell me what I need to do get the floors level, the ceiling supported, the air handling vents in the right places and the plumbing planned out.

Down to the Studs

And then the hardest of all, getting my wife to understand the mechanics need to be worked out first before she starts making the decorating decision. She’s already got a whole stack of magazines with sticky notes marking the stuff she likes. I’m afraid to look.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening