Today is the day we crank up the bottle jack on the old Oklahoma Ave house.  The trick is going to be finding a place to put the jack.  How does one jack up the roof when the termites have eaten the floor?  We sang an old, old song at church last night called “How Firm a Foundation.”  I was wondering about this.

I’ve made a plan.  The object here is to switch out a new 10″ column for the cheap one that doesn’t match.  In the process we’re going to level the roofline as much as possible.  The same corner incidentally had been nearly destroyed by water damage and termites.  I’ve got a floor jack (not a bottle jack) and a new post holding it all together, and have ever since we started working here a couple weeks ago.

The new post goes straight into the earth.  We’ll jack from there.

I’m going to pick up the new column up from Christmas Lumber here in a few minutes.  It had to be specially made.  Secondly I’m picking up a 4×12 board of cedar to build matching caps for all three columns.  Finally from the pictures you’ll notice that the floor joists are all eaten and the flooring was rotten and busted out.  These were issues we didn’t feel like could be covered with paint.

And then tomorrow we’ll paint it.  Unless we run into any problems but I don’t see why we would.