Prepared For Surprises
Construction ran from October 2003 until May 2004, and the old house threw them some curves. Removing the poles upstairs was one such challenge. “The engineer had to look at the poles and the load on the roof. Because of this being a hip roof, the loads are on your corners and all four corners push out,” Klein says. “He came up with a system where we strapped the outside of the upper walls with a continuous metal strap that was lag-screwed on the outside of the top plate. He also designed some brackets that were lag-screwed to the top and bottom of the ridge rafters.” Working around the weather posed another challenge. The Emry’s water comes up from the lake through a pipe shared with the house next door. During the renovation, the Emrys rented that house. At one point, the water in the shared pipe froze. Water was also an issue near the end of the project. During heavy rains, water coming off the hill washed out the gravel from the driveway, which then had to be re-graded and a drywell system installed in front of the garage. The road also had to be re-routed to direct water away from the driveway.
Another surprise: “When we tore the porch off,” Klein says, “there wasn’t a foundation between the porch and the cabin, so we had to dig that out and run a foundation, which was hard because the crawl space was so tight.”
Klein’s Improvement gutted the main floor, tore off a back laundry/entry area, and added a garage/laundry area; a dining area was added where a deck had been (Geoff had torn it off before the project began). Klein vaulted the ceiling in the living room, moved and rebuilt the stairway to the second story, installed a new heating system, re-roofed and re-sided the whole house, put in a new kitchen and bath on the main floor, and eliminated the interior stairs to the basement, which had been right at the entryway. Outside, he re-graded the road coming down to the garage because the driveway stopped at a slightly higher grade. In the end, Klein estimated correctly; there was $40,000 in change orders. The Emrys didn’t balk. “Rudy and I met every Wednesday at 10:30,” Crystal says. “We were always communicating and seemed to be on the same page. It was never ‘Oh, by the way …’ He was very good at telling me [something] could happen and that we needed to be prepared. We were never surprised.”