Home improvement

We have lived in our present location for a little over four years.  We moved into this house when our kid was a few months short of three years old.

One of the bedrooms is a converted courtyard or perhaps an old porch.  It is “built” (such as it is) at grade, with a picture window overlooking the fence, which is about two feet away.  It is a shitty little room with a warped floor and no insulation, but it is pink, so our young daughter decided it was to be her bedroom.

In the winter, this crap room would get very cold, and our needlessly labrynthine ductwork did nothing to heat it sufficiently.  The child never complained, but we were a bit uneasy having our kid sleep in a room with ice on the window.  We spent a bunch of money having insulation blown into the walls, with little effect.  We then spent a bunch more money to get warm air routed more effectively into this little space, which at least cleared our consciences somewhat.

A persistent bugaboo with this room, however, was the periodic materialization of two distinct smells.  One smell was a sort of deeply peaty scent, like rotting leaves or heavy moss.  The other was, well, quite unmistakeably sewer gas.

The vegetal scent was easy to explain.  The room had a cold floor and was built most likely directly on a slab, which had very likely cracked and was allowing the pungent scent of earth to waft on occasion into the room.  Not a major concern.

Sewer gas, however, is an altogether more noxious matter.

We had a plumber come check out a bunch of junk, and he found two toilets that were not seated properly.  Upon having them reseated, we found the sewer gas problem had disappeared.  But respite was brief.  After the course of a few months, it seemed to return, fleetingly but with some frequency.

The two smells combined to create a irritant with some real urgency behind it.  It seemed we would have to gut the room at some point to rectify the problem fully, probably starting with the floor, since the smells seemed to emanate from below.

Today, I woke up uncharacteristically early, and I decided it was high time I cross some of the infernal ‘chores’ off my ‘list’ that gets made on my behalf.  One of these chores (self-assigned I must admit) was to attach a safety strap between the wall in our child’s room and her bookcase.  The bookcase is rather heavy as bookcases go; add the fact that it is filled with books, and having it land on our child or any other would be unfortunate.

I got my drill, a screwdriver, and the necessary odds and ends.  I went into her room and was about to start working when I thought to myself, “Self, you know, this little thing is just another thing that will make this room more of a permanent installation.  You know this room has problems, and if you mean to solve them, you mustn’t ensconce your child further in this place.  Move her things into the ‘blue’ room up the hall, and get to work!”

And so we did.  We moved every bit of everything out of the room–stuffed animals, bed, dresser, clothes, that heavy-ass bookcase and all the books.  Dollhouse.  Etcetera.

And once the room was clear, I started picking away at the floor.

Pretty nice flooring.  Solid hardwood, mahogany-stained something or other.  Unfortunately not salvageable, as it was nailed in place.  Once I got one piece up, the rest came rather easily, at which point I was looking at a plywood substrate.

The substrate was fully wack.  Whoever had installed this floor had done so in the quickest, cheapest, most stupid fashion possible.  The section closest to the wall was at a thirty-degree angle to the rest of the floor.  It made me angry just to look at it.

I yanked up a section of the plywood and peered beneath it.  Aha!  Yes, the concrete footing beneath the wall was crumbling, exposing the room to the elements and thereby compromising all our efforts to heat it.  I dug a bit deeper.  “Ah yes,” I thought, “this thing isn’t even built on a slab after all.  It’s built on rotting joists over a patch of dirt!  No wonder it smells like vegetation in here.”

Beneath the next layer of plywood were some one-inch stringers, and beneath those was a layer of old hardwood, which looked to be a remnant of that old porch we’d imagined.  I peeled back several boards and looked beneath them.

There was a gaping maw maybe four feet deep, which looked to be full of wet dirt and debris.  It was a bit shocking to see such a raw, open, earthy space in one’s house, but I can’t say as it surprised me particularly.  We had expected some kind of crazy outdoor space had been here originally.

But at the bottom of the maw was a very large pipe.  “Well, that is a very large pipe,” I thought to myself.  “It looks to be quite old.  It looks like the kind of pipe that might once have been the main drain for the house.”  I got up and went into the kitchen, where I pulled open a drawer and removed a flashlight.  I went back to our child’s room and crouched down to peer into the maw.  I shone the flashlight directly on the pipe.

It was broken, clearly.  “Wow, that would be quite a thing if that pipe was in use.  What a problem it would….If I didn’t know better, I’d think those spider webs were toilet pa–”

I yelled my wife’s name.  “WHAT?”  She hollered from the other room.

“Would you…go in the kid’s bathroom and…flush the toilet?”

Footsteps padding across the floor.  Gissssshhhhh from down the hall.  PISSSSSSSHHHHHH mere feet away.  Water gushed from the hole in the pipe.

“What happened?”

“What I thought might happen.  Go try our toilet.”

Gisssshhh….PISSSSSHHHHHHH.

I don’t know that our child has been sleeping, reading, playing, laughing, and dancing over an open sewer every day that we’ve lived in this house.  But she has been doing it some, sure enough.