Denizen of the Month: A TERRIFYING Disaster, Barely Dodged (Patreon)

This is a big one...because it was a big problem, and fixing it was a huge process. I can hardly get over how close we came to losing the back half of the house.

So...turns out my back porch was pretty much gone. I didn't realize it until early summer when I went outside and saw some rot, though paint and ignorance hid the worst of it from my exhausted eyes. I did know it was bad. I did look around and get a very resigned and upset look on my face imagining how much it would cost and, honestly, how long it would take to get anyone on this island to even give me a quote, let alone do the work, if they ever did (see last month's scream into the void re: floors and the island "contractors" who waited a year to tell me they would not fix them). 

And with that look on my face, I told myself that with all the other things I needed to pay for this year that I could barely afford, plus the pipe-bursting damage, I just...didn't have the money to deal with what was clearly...a lot...this year. Inside of the house this year, outside of the house next year, I told myself. Yeah, it's pretty bad, but it'll hold another winter, because, well, it has to.

But throughout the summer, because my nieces were living here and we made a speakeasy on the front porch, we made a lot of new friends and had a lot of new people in and out of the house, some of whom, inevitably, thought a drink on the back porch might be nice, too, and then ran screaming from the apocalyptic deck situation out there.

Fucking unbelievably fortunately for me, one of those new friends happened to be a carpenter named Doug. Doug took one look at that deck, got quite a similar upset look on his face, and said Oh, Cat. Oh no. You can't...you can't not fix this. It's so dangerous.

But even he didn't actually realize that the entire porch, roof, and back third of the house were being held up by a single 2x2 peg of wood surrounded by mush that had been eaten away by various insects until you could, and we all did, walk up to it and stick your finger into the post like so much cheese.

IT WAS FUCKING UNSETTLING.

Doug agreed to do the work for me as cheaply as he could (still not that cheap, but...another winter was wishful thinking, as it turns out. The first heavy snow likely would have brought the whole thing down. Homeownership means never being able to say "I can't afford to fix that." As it turns out.) It had already become clear that the main island contractor boys were very backed up and not that interested in even finishing the job they'd already been paid for (and would, it turns out, never finish, for no reason). So the kindness of strangers saved us. But every time he pulled up a board he'd find more rot, more weird stashes of garbage from various homeowners past shoved under the house, more disintegrating house, liquefying into nothing from beneath.

It's been...well. Highly metaphorical. A little too on-the-nose, honestly, but that's houses for you. No sense of subtlety.

The happy ending to this story is that the deck, as you can see in the second batch of photos, is all repaired now, though it took a hell of a long time with the constant delightful discovery of new problems. And check it out, it's quite a bit better than just "repaired." My friend made it pretty for me because I was extremely pathetic and despairing, with little wee flourishes and fleur de lis and a totally decadent inlay of various woodscraps he had lying around that delights me every single day. It is now safe and gorgeous and no one is going to fall through into a Trashvoid of Unknown Dimension if they look at the stairs wrong. It's just about the nicest place imaginable for morning coffee, so nice I can't even pick a chair to go out there because it's just too pretty for furniture to compete with.

There is so much work left to do on this house...more than I ever realized. But slowly, it's coming round and remembering that it used to be a very lovely lady once upon a time, and maybe one day will be again.

If the house could lay off the metaphors that would be great, though.