Wednesday, November 25, 2020

House to Home, Volume 6 - The Bathtub Guy

The day was September 3, 2019.  The location was my local Jeep dealership, 40 minutes away from my house.  I was trading in my rescue green Jeep Wrangler for a rescue green Jeep Compass and while making small talk with the sales kid I found out he lives not far from me.  So I asked if he knew any contractors and he said yes, his friend's dad owns Baker Builders.  Cool cool, I wrote down the name.

Jump ahead to THE VERY NEXT DAY and I'm sitting at my desk at work.  My office is on the second story and normally my view out the window is blue skies above and parking lot down below.  Something caught my eye and there -- PRACTICALLY PRESSED AGAINST THE OUTSIDE OF THE WINDOW -- was a guy on scaffolding and the back of his shirt said Baker Builders.  What are the freakin' odds?  I went downstairs, saw someone who looked like he was in charge, and that's how I met Bryan Baker.

On October 16, over a year later, most of his crew showed up at my house at the crack of dawn for the first day of official demo!  Actually that's not true, someone came over the day before and started removing the metal roof which I'm going to reuse (reduce, recycle) because it looks brand new.  I've been taking pictures out the guest room window and later I will post all of them together, but here's how it looked when I got home from work on October 15th.


The objective on the 16th was to save the roof, remove the appliances, make things easier for the excavator, and cut the trouse additions away from my house.  (At this point I was still pretty damn nervous that the house would fall right over when it no longer had the trailer to lean against - the trailer was there first, and the house sits on piers.  A lot of sleep was lost worrying about this scenario.)  And remember my clawfoot tub?  I asked if they could please haul it out for me and this is the text I got from Bryan middle of the day, checking to see if I liked my new bathroom fixture:


HAHAHA!  That's Jake.  We just call him the bathtub guy now.

Roxie and StanLee supervised out the guest room window and when I got home from work, this was the view from up there:


Here's that pile up close and personal:


The view out the window at the top of my stairs changed dramatically, as did the view from my kitchen door:





I had a porch!  And it was weird!  Walking around the trouse, here's the front with no metal roof:


And here's the metal pile - the giant antenna, appliances, and the crappy stuff from the front roof.  Spoiler alert:  they found two more layers of roof underneath this one.


Around back, here's where the large window shattered and left broken glass all over the place.  I've been fighting the broken glass battle here for seven years and it appears the battle is not over.  Don't worry, though, it will get worse.


If you look really close you can see where they cut the wall to the right of the window closest to the house.  Sliced it from bottom to top, through the floor and the roof, until they got to the original trailer.  For reference, that big window was my library gym and the two smaller windows were in the trailer bathroom.

And here's the picture I mentioned in my last post showing the trailer kitchen post-pre-demo:


Lookin' good.  All this happened on a Friday so I had the weekend to freak out about it and pack my bags.  Roxie was heading to Camp Killington (a/k/a my mom's house) and StanLee and I were temporarily moving to my sister's basement, because the excavator was coming on Monday....

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