"Pop pop pop," goes the sheetrock.
"Groan groan groan," go the walls.
"Eeerk, eeerk, eeerk," go the 94-year-old windows in their frames.
"Crash boom kerplonk," go the bricks falling out of the decrepit chimney and into the firebox below.
"No es bueno," goes the foreman on the work crew, explaining to me what just happened with the chimney.
Yes, folks, this is foundation repair week chez Dreher. You can make a fortune in the Dallas area doing foundation repair, given the clay soil in these parts. Thank heaven we have a pier-and-beam foundation, not a slab. I can't tell you how weird it is to spend an afternoon with your house literally moving under your feet. No offense to my Golden State readers, but if this is a super-gentle version of an earthquake, you can have California.
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And just how much coin is No es bueno costing you, Rod?
I'd rather take my chances with an occasional earthquake than hurricanes and tornadoes twice a year, every year.
Foundation repair week? Is this a regularly-occurring thing?
Well, if this home repair becomes too much to take, you can always move to Preston Hollow and have George W. Bush as your new neighbor. He'll be going into the inevitable post-Presidency makeover mode, and maybe you can turn him into a Crunchy Con. You think that's impossible? Hey, Nixon went to China.
And just how much coin is No es bueno costing you, Rod?
$6,000. But I gotta say, that work crew has done a great job, and they've worked their butts off. Foundation repair is a big industry in the Dallas area, considering how poor our soil is. I asked the foreman last night, after he and I had been crawling around under the house inspecting the work, if he could tell when the last time the house had been made level was. He said it was probably leveled just before we bought it four years ago.
"You're kidding!" I said. "Does that mean we'll have to call you back in four years to do this all over again?!"
No, he said. The crew that did it before did a very poor job. He showed me how they'd installed insufficient beam support, and suchlike. This fix should hold for a long time. But nothing is permanent in this soil.
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