Another long and productive day. I got up shortly after 05:00 since I went to bed early again last night. I dinked around for quite a while, then I got Tyler up about 09:30.
After he was woke up enough to work, we went down into the crawl space with the jack; we made some progress, but not much. We decided to go rent some jacks, and we came back with two screw-type jacks. We had to have some blocks to set them on, so we hauled some cement blocks down to the basement and threw them into the crawl space and crawled in after them.
The crawl space is maybe 28 inches high, and is accessible via a hole about 2X2 feet. It was evidently used for storage of, among other things, drinking glasses of all sorts. The boxes that they were in originally had disintegrated, and they were scattered in pieces throughout the dirt floor of the space, maybe 10X10 feet.
This 28-inch clearance is shared by various pipes and wires and many many spiders. Not really very nice working conditions, as you might imagine.
We spent a coupla hours positioning the jacks, jacking them up, listening to the floor above creak and groan, checking the level of the floor in the kitchen and repositioning the jacks again... then, when we were satisfied that we could do no more, we started filling in the gaps with chunks of wood and wedges.
We decided to take the jacks back to the rental place and get some foam filler stuff for insulation... and we ran into a parade. Topeka West was having their homecoming parade on the street where we wanted to be, and there was a major traffic jam. We survived that and made it back home, filled in the gaps and took showers, calling it a day.
The kitchen, which was a full bubble off level, is now only about an eighth off... pretty good for a coupla amateurs, huh?
Karen got home shortly after I got cleaned up, and we decided to go look at stuff at Lowes, mostly windows and skylights and fireplaces. We went to Builders Square first, though, 'cause they're selling everything out and they're going out of business... but they didn't have anything that we wanted, and their prices were still pretty damned high.
We did get some literature on skylights and on windows at Lowes, plus I talked to a salesman about installing windows, and he gave me a lot of good information.
Karen had bought a steak yesterday, a sirloin, and I put it on the grille when we got home and she baked some potatoes... good old 'merican meat and potatoes...
And I'm pretty well physically exhausted again, but I'm going to try to stay up a little later tonight, so I don't get up so early in the morning...
More tomorrow...