My 100-year-old house is built on a pier foundation, meaning it has a crawlspace and no basement. As I'm on all fours crawling under my house, the space between the floor joists and the ground becomes smaller and smaller. Suddenly I'm army crawling until I can't make it any further. Bad f*cking news, the back two rooms of my house were built directly on the ground with no foundation in sight.
I knew I had to demolish the entire back half of my house and rebuild it. That meant money and a whole lot of work I couldn't do myself. Hey, I know my limits and I draw the line at structural foundation. All I could do for the time being was wait, improve what I could, and start saving money.
For nearly four years, I lived with my kitchen and primary bedroom on the ground. This meant that it was slowly sinking further into the mud. There were all kinds of unwanted visitors in that side of the house — squirrels (more than I ever knew, we'll get there), mice, ants, lizards, swarms of flies (literally hundreds...at once), and slugs as big as hot dogs to name a few. In the winter, it got so cold the clear dish soap would freeze and turn white. Eventually the roof started to give in and when it rained, it would rain down the walls of the kitchen.
It constantly smelled, whether I took out the trash or not (stay tuned, we'll find out why). Sounds great, right? It was a complete nightmare.
I finally reached a point where I saved money, and made enough improvements on other areas of the house to start the process of finding a contractor and getting the house reappraised. It took a full year and seven contractors to find one that would take on the job.
So what's next? Demo day.