When we moved in, we discovered one thing that neither the inspections nor the previous owners had noted: the fact that the closet off the great room was severely water-damaged from a past leak, and the bar for hanging items and shelves above it were unable to actually hold any weight. Fixing the closet ended up on the back burner for quite a while, as we needed to find someone competent who could rip out all the drywall and rebuild things.
Needless to say, whenever we walked past the closet, a little bit of our brains shook their heads disapprovingly. While we took care of the roof above it last summer after we took possession of the house, the unusable space grated on us. As luck would have it, the contractor I hired to dig the trench for the new hot tub’s electrical was interested in the job.
So a quote was given, we said “yes please,” and he arrived one morning and set to work. The first order of business was ripping out all the old damaged bits. Below are some pics of what was underneath; first, a shot of the bottom corner. He had to rebuild the bottoms of the studs since they were so damaged.
The ceiling beams were also in pretty bad shape, but we decided to box in the ceiling instead of trying to pull out the existing beams, as that would take a monumental effort. Here’s a shot of the old beams behind the framework for the new ceiling. (He did clean them up a bit.)
The damage went all the way through the teak flooring.
The POs told us they had spare teak bits somewhere, but when we moved in, those spare bits were nowhere to be found. I scoured the stables and garage, but came up empty-handed. We figured they took any such spare bits with them; after all, these were the people who just had to remove all the custom window coverings (not the blinds but all the valances and some drapes), leaving behind so many ugly staples, gaping screw holes and chipped paint that we just shake our heads. Think I’m kidding? They even took the little valences across the tops of the windows in the studio, no doubt to sell on Craigslist or Ebay.
I had given up hope on finding the spare teak when I suddenly remembered a small pile of random stuff above the panic room door. (Now when I say ‘panic room’ don’t think state-of-the-art structure like in a movie; this is a tiny closet located within a closet that can be locked from the inside.) So we got a ladder and poked around at what was above the panic room. We found spare bits of carpeting, some really ugly wallpaper that we’re thankful does not appear anywhere in our house, and…the spare teak bits. They were still in their original shipping box and, per the newspapers packed in with them, they’d been ordered over twenty years ago, in spring 1995.
So we had options and our contractor continued to work on the closet. It ended up taking him an extra day, but here is the end result:
In the end, though, we decided to not use the teak to replace the closet floor. Agent Smith located the leftover bamboo from when my office and the blue room had their floors redone, and there was just enough to put down in the closet. We’re going to save the teak bits so we can properly repair the area just outside this closet and another area elsewhere in the great room, as both were severely damaged by leaks during the POs’ tenure here.
There you have it: the mini saga of an annoying thing that is now fixed–pretty much sums up most of the posts here–but one last pic of the closet now partially filled with Agent Smith coats and racing gear:
