After closing on TheLOH on April 27th and movin’ on in, we’ve gotten some important structural work done.

The first thing that we needed to do was get our house bolted, so we took care of that in May. Houses didn’t used to be actually attached to their foundations, and living in a state famous for earthquakes, we thought we should make sure that our house stays put. Our incredible real estate agent, Ambra Bisconti, introduced us to Mike at White Castle Construction.

When Mike’s team showed up they knew our house was going to be bad as they’re the team that gets the really tough jobs. The crawl space under the house was filled with garbage and cat poop, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Termites had eaten the entire subfloor underneath the bathroom and the only thing holding the tub up was the pipe coming out of the wall. There was also a half inch gap between the wall and the tub that the previous owners had stuck hot glue down and called it a day. Hot glue! Check it out…

Who does that?

So, we donned some makeshift crawl suits and took a tour of the crazy.

Here’s what we found (or didn’t find)…

The subfloor under the tub – where is it? Check out the jack on the right holding it up.

Here’s a better look at the layers of tile, concrete, and rotten subfloor that the guys pulled out of there…

This isn’t supposed to look like this…

This would be our poop pipe. Just leaking out on everything (and everyone).

Now our house is attached to the foundation.

White Castle retrofits every house for 3 stories of safety, so even though we’ve got only one floor, we’ve got more protection than we need. We don’t plan on adding a floor, but we could if we wanted to.

First project – done! Now only 19,004 to go…