buckled up

I should preface this update with a little sidenote: I recently told hubby that I thought the hallway floor in the addition seemed to dive downward in one spot. I figured perhaps the floor trusses were sagging. Apparently he did not believe me.

Yesterday we had one more thing go wrong with the addition. The HVAC guy was getting ready to start installing, when he went into the basement, only to find that the ground beneath the concrete had frozen, causing a whole lot of heaving and buckling, forcing the stairwell footings up four inches, and of course cracking the concrete.

He immediately told hubby about it, who had to call me and tell me I was right about the floor moving. (When's the next time I'll hear that phrase?) I had thought the floor was sagging, but instead it had risen in one spot.

It was fine when HVAC guy was here in January, so apparently the warming and then deep freeze in February found its way to the basement, doing a number on the addition. Now, we have a nearly useless concrete floor that will have to be removed and hauled out bucket by bucket and the 2x4's in the stairwell look like bananas.

Hubby tried to thaw things down there with a propane heater and some electric milkhouse heaters, but after doing some quick mathematics, realized that it would take us nearly a month to thaw and cost nearly $1K. So, instead he ran to Mpls. and bought some sort of concrete thawing blanket (that also cost nearly $1K) and we've got that plugged in now. It is supposed to thaw 12 inches overnight. We'll see how well it'll work since he'll have to move it around spot by spot to get the entire concrete floor covered.

Minnesota winters are getting harder to tolerate. The good news is that we're learning all sorts of things as we try to build this addition ourselves - some of it is knowledge we'd rather not know.

Too late to unbuckle and get off this ride.