Revival on Vance: Progress from last year (final update)

So we left off with the house being gutted inside and stripped down to the original siding outside. Here's where it got ugly...and complicated. We had a foundation company come out to determine what kind of work under the house was needed (this was new territory for us since neither of our previous houses had any foundation issues). We got a staggering bid from them to sure up the beam in the middle of the house and under the side where the wrap around porch is. But we went with it - thinking, "at least it's being done by a specialist in the field and it'll be done right." Long story short...they did what they said they would do but it was the completely WRONG fix for what our issues were under the house. The building inspector was LIVID, and we were sick about it. Eventually we were refunded about 60% of the job and turned around and spent that (plus more) to have our carpentry crew lay a new foundation on the entire right side of the house. By this time, all the exterior siding had been ripped off since it was too rotten to save.

View from across Vance Ave.

Standing in the Living Room

But this is when the house got ugly...all the floor and joists under half of the house (mainly living room and dining room) were removed as well as the studs to that entire wall facing the vacant lot. It was secured by some posts and bracing...but very scary to look at.

We get word from the city that our construction permit won't suffice; so I head back to their permit office to increase it. Here's when we were dealt the big blow...since our project had become so much more than a remodel and since we would not be occupying it once completed, we would not be allowed to continue without a general contractor. This was a big game changer financially for us, but we pressed on. A few came out to bid the project, some never got back to me, one was too busy to take it on, one thought we'd never get past the mechanical inspector for HVAC to run underneath, and so on. Ronnie was pretty thorough in bidding the project, but we didn't hear back from him for a long time. So the other guy that was worried about mechanical had pretty much convinced us that it's too expensive to fix to move forward, and that we should just level the house, and hope to build new construction later. That echoed what the building inspector had been saying all along. Like I mentioned in a previous post, we were moments from calling the demo contractor in when Ronnie called back with the quote. Fast forward to now, and Ronnie is halfway finished with the job!! As you can see from the pictures below from last fall, he inherited quite a mess when he started this January.