CRAWL SPACE WORK
My hips are so sore I can't sleep on my sides and my elbows look like a baboon's butt.
It’s the result of one day of crawl space work.
To the average able-bodied red-blooded American, the single most repellent thing about working in the trades, I would guess, would be crawl space work. You’re crawling and working and this unsavory combination takes place in a cramped, dark, dirty, dusty, and spider-infested space. It’s ugly work, but at the same time it’s of the first order of importance. Some people don’t tend to their crawl, and will instead spend money freshening up the interior with paints and trims and new cabinet faces, while the very foundation of the structure crumbles. I always think the crawl space is a good place to spend money, even though I dread working in them. You never know what you’re going to find.
One time I was deep in the bowels of a low, dark crawl space. The ground was bare packed dirt that had opened with deep ugly fissures made hairy by rootlets. The joist bays overhead where matted with spider webs and cave crickets clustered in the corners. Then, against the block wall, my headlamp illuminated the long parchment-like shed skin of a snake. I clenched my teeth and was racked with deep willies, thankful that it was only a skin. But imagine crawling into a living snake.
I know a plumber named Hubert who hates snakes. He’s a big guy, and one time he was working out in the country and had to crawl under a house to get at a remote drain line. While he was back in the corner of the cave-like crawl space, he saw a snake. It crossed between him and the exit, and then disappeared into darkness. Hubert freaked out and started bellowing about the snake until the other plumbers ran down to the entrance and tried to talk him into making a quick scuttling exit. But, he was frozen in place with fear. Finally they went back upstairs, found the spot above Hubert, cut a hole in the floor, and hauled him out that way.
So, I guess it could be worse than baboon elbows and ginked-up hips. Besides, I did get to spend a day in the country.
The story of this job is that Henry got word from Sonny King, the tall stridently conservative plumber, that his house was sinking and he needed someone to shore it up. He said there are only two crews he trusts and the other guys managed to beg off the work. Sonny lives way out in the country north of Oldesborough, at a sprawling, goat-infested piece of land he calls King's Plantation. The drive was a happy affair on this sunny October morning, all rolling hills, hayfields and the thick hardwood forests that still make up so much of North Carolina.
When I got there Henry and Ollie were standing in front of an opening in the foundation wall sussing out the specifics of the job. Sonny had pulled the cement steps away from the house with a burly chain and his backhoe, revealing a three-foot by one-foot entrance into the fairy tale underworld. It looked like a half-closed mouth on the little house. Around it was arrayed piles of pressure treated lumber, chop saws, tins of joist clips, coils of cord, boxes of screws, four house jacks that could lift a combined thirty two tons, and two five-gallon buckets of water on which floated a mat of lamely swimming ants. The buckets filled me with dread, as I knew the water was meant for mixing concrete, which we were going to be pouring in the crawl space, on our hands and knees. A heavy sigh passed through my being as I pondered the specifics of my day underneath this old log cabin.
According to Sonny a black farmer named McKenzie, who owned two hundred and eighty acres of the fertile farmland, built the house in the 1940s. In the 50’s he fell on hard times, and got behind on property taxes. Sonny's grandfather, who owned a lumber mill, offered to pay off the tax bill in exchange for ownership of half the land, and timber rights to all of it. McKenzie's family retained the main farmhouse, and the log cabin, but Sonny says that they partied too much and burned the main place down. This tragic turn then forced McKenzie to sell off the smaller log cabin.
Since then the Kings have covered the twenty-by-twenty log home with a new tin roof, built a big addition off the back, and masked almost all evidence of the logs with vinyl siding. Even on the inside the only thing that would tip you off to it not being the plain 50’s home of regular southern country white people, are the extremely low ceilings.
The best place to see just how far the house has sunk is from the television room. When Sonny's wife Tina sits down at her big leather easy chair, surrounded by her various rubs and tissues and puts down her copy of Cajun Heat to turn her attention to the television in the corner, she's likely to get vertigo because the whole room slopes down four inches over a twelve-foot span, such that the old Quasar looks like it might fall off the stand. As they say in these parts, the room is woppy-jawed all to hell. She's been beating a steady drum of complaints for so long that the tight-fisted Sonny has decided to finally call in the carpenters. So here we go.
Henry showed Ollie and I what to do and then left for another job, thoughtfully wishing us the best of luck.
Since Ollie usually stakes out a position of cut man, my first order of business was to get under the house and lay out a nice bed of clean plastic, so I wouldn't have to crawl over dead beetles, and old tarps coated in our local orange dirt. With that down I had a place to lay my head and call out for Ollie to send in tools. This gave me an opportunity to look around at the underside of a log cabin, circa WWII.
I think old McKenzie started with his stone pillars - mounds of massive flat and dirty stones dry-stacked every eight or ten feet around the edges of the foot print, and several along a line down the center. Then he placed big oak logs on these piers of stone – his rim joists around the outside and girders across the middle. Then he notched out some pine logs and placed them across the girder to the rim joists – these are his floor joists. Upon this structure he could put down a lot of flooring, erect walls, frame up a roof, and make an entire log home.
But over the years the south side rim joist has been nearly eaten up by bugs. I was able to peel off huge half-rounds of bark, and could bury a putty knife in the bread-like wood right to the hilt. Therefore the floor joists were munching down into this rotten member and the whole house was tipping towards the front yard. Our job was to jack up that side of the house as high as we could, then build a new wall – a shore wall in the crawl space – to maintain the achieved height.
It sounds simple enough, but since all of the floor joists are un-milled logs they present a very uneven set of contact points for jacking. We have to get a long level four-by-six pressed up to the bottom of about sixteen of these logs. This means grinding down the proud logs and shimming up the slight ones. The grinding was the worst of all the tasks, as I was using both hands to wield the tool, which meant ab crunches in a sawdust storm.
Luckily the soil was hard enough to avoid pouring concrete. Instead we used sand, which we had to drag around in fifty-pound bags, on our hands and knees like crabs husbanding a big catch. Since there’s only about thirty inches of height down there, all the work was drudgery and I was getting bedsores and pulling muscles at the same time. That’s a very strange mix, like combining an extended hospital stay with bouts of lumberjacking.
But then there were minutes here and there where I could just lie back and wait for Ollie to bring me a pump jack handle, or a new drill battery, just lie there pondering the floor joists and the thousands of perfect tiny pin-prick holes of the pine beetles; or trying to get Roosevelt-era vibes from old McKenzie’s work; or staring out through the opening at the late October heat wavering over the lawn as Ollie's boots lumbered back and forth from the wood pile to the chop saw. The ladybugs were out for their mid-Autumn swarming. They came in droves, flying and crawling over everything as they do every October. They seem to be looking for someplace to bed down for the winter, and this cool crawl space might do nicely.
When I’m down below a house I like to think about how radically different the crawl space is from the living space. Down here it’s dirty and there are bugs and exfoliating logs and dark recesses, drafts and cockroach excrement. But just on the other side of the subfloor and floorboards, a mere inch and a half above middle earth, is an interior room, the home itself. Here is comfort and coziness and familiarity, amidst the romance novels, the curios and the bidet. Yes, the bidet. Sonny, the old ditto head, has a bidet.
Sonny loves his spritzing Toto so much that he’ll drive forty miles back home to use it instead of a conventional head.
"Hey," he says in defense of his fontal crapper, "If you got some poo on your hands by accident, would you just wipe it off with toilet paper, or would you wash it off with water? You wouldn't feel clean until you got some water on that. It's the same thing."
His bidet looks like a normal toilet except for a very thick seat and the few extra lines running into it for power and auxiliary water. The seat seems to contain arms that I imagine swing out and conduct the irrigation, but I'm not sure, as I never did mash any buttons on the control panel. The buttons allow you to choose front or rear, oscillating or normal, and soft or regular cleansing -- both of these latter buttons are illustrated with a line drawing of someone seeming to be held aloft by the plume of a fountain.
Why stop at a simple oscillating soft cleanse? Why not get a full cavity search and prostrate exam? The sky's the limit with this device. I’ve seen him install a half dozen of these things over the years, and the pace of adoption seems to be picking up in North Carolina. He’s become a real Johnny Appleseed of the bidet. Ollie and I had a few good laughs over the bidet. But, what I didn't find so amusing was the family dog.
King’s Plantation is populated by a field of fainting goats, a pair of horses and a donkey, whose occasional bray rang out like an oil derrick throwing a tie rod. They also have a couple of free-ranging country dogs. One is a self-possessed white lab that I befriended with a session of heavy petting. But the other dog came around later, and without introduction.
I was down near the crawl space entrance, when the German shepherd came around the corner growling. Ollie was outside kneeling in front of the chop saw cutting lengths of four-by-four post.
"Ilsa," said Ollie in falsetto. The dog kept coming and growling. Ollie dropped his register. "Come on Ilsa, don't you remember me?" The dog got behind Ollie and sniffed the air as Sonny's wife Tina rounded the corner in her golf cart and yelled for the dog. She kept yelling but the dog didn't come, instead it left Ollie and began tracking a scent. Its nose was to the ground, zigzagging towards the crawl space entrance with that repellent dysplasic hyena-style walk common with German shepherds.
"Fuck!" I thought loudly as it got closer to the entrance and I realized that I could soon be fighting off a Teutonic police dog from a prone position. I didn’t have a weapon at hand, and I couldn't retreat back into the space without making a lot of loud crinkling noises that could be mistaken for scurrying prey. All I could do was lie quietly and prepare to mollify the dog with my sing-song voice or battle it hand-to-hand for possession of the crawl space entrance. The dog was definitely tracking me to my lair, and was about eight feet away when Tina broke the tense silence with a country holler.
"Ilsa!" she cried sharply. The dog turned and loped around the corner. I quickly scurried back away from the entrance, arming myself with hunks of rock and a pump jack handle as I went. Perhaps I was overreacting, but I couldn’t help it. I lay back and pondered the layers of agony under which I labored: the baboon elbows, the dust storm, the possibility of a house collapsing on me, and now close-quarters combat with a police dog in a crawl space.
I needed a little bathroom break to prepare myself for the last and trickiest task of the day: the actual house jacking.
Glancing around on my way to the bathroom I really got a feeling that, culturally, the Kings are different from me. Sonny’s politics are pretty far right of mine – something he makes no bones about – but being in his house I got a feeling of how pronounced the cultural difference between liberals and conservatives can be. For one thing, the food they eat is almost frightening – at least judging from the trays of Little Debbie snack cakes and bags of chips and bulk canisters of crackers and other packaged eatables. I know I spend way too much on locally sourced pasture-raised organic meats – hell, there’s a thirteen-dollar piece of tempeh in my freezer that would ferment Barry Goldwater’s ghost. But the Kings are buying items which were more like novelties than actual foodstuffs.
But what’s the merit of these ruminations anyway? We have a good working relationship, so who cares? Besides, my theories never would have figured Sonny for a bidet man. Enough about the Romney cakes, back to the work.
People who move houses for a living will tell you that in order to keep the house from developing cracks you shouldn’t jack more than one-eighth of an inch a day – the thickness of a nickel. You jack a bit, then call it a day and let the house get used to the new arrangement.
Ha! We needed to get this thing up about four inches…by the end of the second day. Sonny signed off on the breathless pace of the lift, agreeing that he was getting thirty-two days of work for the price of two.
Down below I prepared to jack by piling lumber around me, so that if the house collapsed I might survive in that little pocket of air. Then we jacked. The jacks are heavy and have two metal cylinders filled with oil. With each pump the oil is moved from a reservoir into the pump chamber, which then pushes up on a lifting pad. A few pumps, a lot of creaking and snapping and popping above. Pause. Then a few more pumps, more creaking and groaning. Ollie was outside making measurements and calling for more pumps. When we got the house up three inches we put in a few temporary supports and called it quits for the day, letting the house consider the buck twenty in nickles it was now sitting on.
The next day I got wise and put kneepads on my elbows and dragged a camping pad around with me, which Ollie kept stealing. He’s an old class clown, so he milked the routine until lunch. After our meal under the big white oak in the front yard we put the finishing touches on the wall.
The shore wall is composed of four-by-four posts that sit directly under the beam, and on a plumb line below each joist. The posts are set on cinderblocks that rest on a bed of level sand over cleared and pack earth. Everything is screwed together with a lot of clips and heavy-duty fasteners. The weight of the house and all it’s gun safes and Vick’s bottles and work boots and snack cakes and bidets and romance novels will transfer down through the floor joists, down through these posts, down to the cement block and finally rely on the infinite load-bearing of capacity of mother earth. I’d say we did Sonny a solid.
When it’s all said and done we were only able to jack the floor up only two-and-a-half inches, but at least the house won’t be sagging any more. Inside, in their cramped living room the situation has definitely improved. But, the television still tilts forwards and sideways so I sneak some shims in the blue shag under the cabinet, and voila, the place feels righted. It makes me wonder if maybe we should have just slipped a brick under the television to begin with. It would have saved us thirty man-hours of crouching, wriggling and crawling work. But, Sonny’s happy with the work, I made $275, and so we close the chapter on that job.