Oh, you old house, you.

House, you’re always providing me with lots of surprises dismay consternation cuss words entertainment.

Yesterday I moved left-over construction materials that had leaned against a “naked” corner of the house all winter. Once I got everything shifted away, I got distracted by the corner itself.

Long ago (and don’t ask why; this house would make you crazy if you’re the sort of person who asks why) someone cut about 16 inches of the siding and sheathing away from the northwest corner, leaving studs and a section of interior wall exposed. Having too much else to deal with, I simply stapled plastic sheeting over it and let it be.

This is part of the still-uninhabited back of the house, which I’m only now beginning to turn my eyes to. But I had noticed that under the ghastly 4×8 sheets of 1/4-inch fiberboard that pass as siding there appeared to be potentially cool old tongue-and-groove siding/sheathing.

I started going at that fiberboard cr*p with claw hammer and pry bar. Sure enough, tongue-and-groove wood underneath. Not the prettiest or best quality, and of course it’s all missing from that corner and full of holes from 1970s blown-in insulation. Whether I can use it as a finished exterior wall surface will depend on what I find under the other three sections of fiberboard still to be torn off. Time — and sweat — will tell. But so far, so good. No rot despite years of mistreatment and exposure to the elements.

That bit of labor got me curious about what might be just around the corner. On the north side. Under some even uglier (if that’s possible) fiberboard lap siding.

Here, it took me only about five minutes to discover … well, have a look for yourself:

Sheesh! The only thing holding up that part of the house seems to be … air. That 2×4 was so hole-y I could crush it by hand. The wood sheathing (not T&G) was just plain gone for the most part. The post on the right looks okay, but then I think that’s because somebody stuck it there much later when they realized the wall was rotting away.

Fortunately, what actually is holding up that corner isn’t air. It’s the interior walls. ‘Cause where you or I today would put drywall, and where budget-minded people of the not-to-distant day this house was built might have put another batch of ghastly fiberboard, the interior walls are, again, tongue-and-groove wood.

The very colorful boards you see closest to the house’s corner in the first photo are beadboard (obviously scrounged from multiple sources, given the variety of colors). The interior wall in that second photo is a combo of more scrounged beadboard and the same type of t&g siding I uncovered on the first wall’s exterior.

So the interior wall on that corner of the house has innate structural integrity. And blessedly, it appears to be rot free.

I didn’t know the interior walls were wood until I started prying at the exterior, because you can’t see from inside. Somebody, sometime, covered the wood with sheets of 1/4-inch plywood.

This is what the inside of that corner looked like shortly after I bought the house (and still looks like today because, other than finishing bleaching the mold off the walls, I haven’t touched that room yet):

Yeah. Ick. I know.

This part of the house is the biggest remaining challenge. It needs everything: complete replacement of the foundation beams, jacking up, a tear-out of all the interior walls, tear-down of an ill-advised extension, and a total re-plumbing.

The only thing good on it is the roof, and that’s thanks to you. I once considered tearing this back part of the house down entirely. That would have left the house as a studio (no bedroom), which would have been okay. But the only bathroom is in that back section of the house, also, and I never could figure out a way to move/reconstruct the bathroom that wouldn’t be as complicated and expensive as just renovating the existing mess.

This project will take years. I’ll do a lot of it myself, and I’m thinking that the basic structural and plumbing work (hired) can be done for around $6,000. Yes, even the foundation beams. That may sound absurdly optimistic, but I’ve already had foundation work, teardowns, jacking, and rot repair done elsewhere on the house, so while that budget may indeed turn out optimistic, it isn’t as unrealistic as it may sound to those of you who hire pricey experts instead of handymen. Of course, that still leaves the bare stud walls, the floors, and such for me to deal with. But hey, I have the time. And — marginally — I even have the skills.

Better yet, I now have a very cool idea (more on that over the years) on how to turn all that misbegotten, badly thought-out, catastrophically constructed, and now crumbling space into something … well, we’ll just have to wait and see. 🙂

One thing I’m now looking forward to is tearing the plywood off the walls of that bedroom to see whether the goofy melange of beadboard and t&g siding underneath has potential as an arty and unconventional wall treatment.