To bring everyone up to update on what I've been doing, first, I suppose I should give a little back story about the house we have been working on. It is located at the end of a holler way out in Knott County and is owned by an older couple who live alone there. It is a small box house which as I can best explain it means that this house was never framed out with studs and whatnot. Instead it is a big box with planks nailed to the frame for the walls with drywall added on the inside and wood siding on the outside. As you can imagine, this does not make for the best insulation situation. In fact, working on this house, we've seen that the house was mainly insulated with newspapers and cloth. We even found a newspaper from the 1920s!
The list of repairs being done by CAP for this house include:
- New vinly siding
- Interior painted
- Drywall on ceiling patched
- All new windows and door
- New kitchen cupboards and sink
- Bathroom repairs including new toilet
- New front porch steps
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| New cupboards before we put on the counter top and sink |
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| Kate putting together the new porch stairs |
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| Me putting up Tyvek paper |
The past week and a half or so we have been working on putting up vinyl siding on the exterior of the house. It has been quite a process because as it is with most of our houses nothing is plumb or level and things never work out quite the way you think they should. Another fun part about this house is its particular location on the hillside. The best way I can describe it is to say you can walk out of the back door into their yard, but in the front there is a walk-out basement with a 9 ft high porch above it. I have become quite good at setting up, taking down, and using scaffolding over the past few weeks. It can get really tricky trying to get the ladders out of the way of your work and getting the ladder jacks set up evenly so your plank isn't wobbly, but it does keep you on your toes. It can be quite terrifying when you first walk out onto the plank and know that one misstep and you could fall 20 feet straight down onto the ground. But as I've been told numerous times, its not the fall you need to be concerned about, its the landing.  |
| Me, Jess, and Heather before I almost fell to my death. |
There have been numerous times that I have been on the scaffolding and lost my balance for a second and scared myself a little, but never honestly came close to falling. Until yesterday. I legitimately saw my life flash before my eyes yesterday. I was standing on the edge of a piece of scaffold trying to get up a rather difficult piece of Soffit which also happened to be the last piece we were putting up for the day. Jess (Kate's sister who came to visit with her best friend Heather) was up on the scaffolding with me and was standing in the middle handing me pieces. (The picture I put in may help you picture this story a little better. I was standing on the very end of the scaffold towards the left of this photo.) We finished getting up the Soffit and then Tony came up on the ladder to check out what our next step would be and decided to call it a day. Jess decided to step off the scaffold and onto the porch rail which was in front of us rather than climbing down the ladder 20 ft or so. When she said she was going to step off the scaffold, I didn't even think anything about it, until I felt the scaffold falling beneath me. Simple physics had taken over. Without Jess in the middle, the edge of scaffold that was extended several feet by the jacks started working like a seesaw and went down towards the ground. Only problem was the ground was at least 20 feet below me. Luckily, Jess immediately realized what was happening and stepped back on the scaffold and I grabbed onto the ladder and was no worse for the wear except for the fact that I think I lost a good 5 years off my life.
Just another day at the work site.
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