Restoring old wood beams
Falling through concrete floors and other life choices
Greetings from Cornudella de Montsant,
All my life’s choices have come down to a section of rot in an old wooden beam. It’s a bigger section than I expected and the beam is in worse shape than it appeared when I bought the place a year ago.
From the bottom looking up, these old, wooden beams appear something close to beautiful. If nothing else, I thought when I first walked the house, I would be able to preserve these beams and have them to show at the end of the renovation.
Even the architect agreed. The beams are in good shape, he declared. So too is the concrete, even if it is cracked here and there.
But a year later, I’m waiting with a coffee so I can show him the large hole in that cracked concrete floor, a hole I nearly plunged my entire body through.
The story goes: I was taking a shower, and it’s getting cold here in November. The space heater can only fill one room at a time—I’ve put it in the kitchen, on the other side of the house from the tiny shower with the five-gallon tank that I installed after the original started shorting out the electricity. So when I got out of the shower and into a cold bathroom, I immediately started shivering and rushed toward the room with the heat.
I suppose it was the weight from this rushed canter from the bathroom to the kitchen that is responsible for the slight increase in force that caused the concrete to finally fail. One moment I was heading for warmth—the next, my foot went through the floor.
I’ve written several times about the “crumbling plaster and cracked concrete” in this house, but until now I never actually expected the concrete to, you know, crack.
My leg went in until my shin hit the edge of the hole. I cursed, though no one was there to hear me. Then I stood up, pulled my leg from the gap, and suddenly realized it could have been much, much worse.
That was five days ago. When the architect showed up, he looked at the hole and told me to be careful. Don’t worry, I told him—I’m ordering some OSB to place over the hole so I don’t fall through again.
The episode added a certain urgency to work on the top floor, which is how I got to the minor existential crisis staring at the rot in the wood beam.
If a home has good bones, they tell you, then anything is possible.
If not, well you might as well tear the whole thing down. But does my house have good bones? That was the existential question of the day.
I had started with the crowbar, extracting thick nails with brute leveraged force, one after another. It was after demolishing half the concrete floor with a sledgehammer that the problems revealed themselves. The underside of the beams may have looked fine, but the top part, the part in contact with the concrete, was more often rotted than not.
Next, I used an orbital sander, then, wanting more surface area on the wood, I tried the belt sander. It generated an immediate haze of reddish dust off the top of the first beam. The more I pressed, the more rotted wood came off.
I switched to a stiff steel brush, and even more wood started coming off. There I was, sitting on an old wood beam between two levels of my 250-year-old Spanish townhome, seriously questioning my life decisions; if the rot went all the way through, what was I even doing here? If I ended up having to replace all the beams, what even was the point?
Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m doing here, I told my Hungarian friend as he helped me shovel concrete and brick debris out the window onto the back terrace below. I could just rent a normal apartment.
He was in town to climb, but had graciously offered to help out for a few hours on the renovation.
That has no soul, he responded.
In any case, I kind of had to build the floor. Plunging through cracked concrete was unsustainable, and I’m already into this project for something north of $60,000. I really do have to go through with it.
So I throw the sledgehammer at the concrete. Shovel the debris out the window. Sand the beams down from the rot and grit and grime of who knows many decades of neglect. Then I will brush them with anti-rot, anti-fungal stain before attaching an actual level floor I know will not suddenly crack under my weight after a shower.
The project is too big for me to think about all the steps at once. It’s like climbing in that way: I only focus on what’s in front of me, the next small step, or I’ll quickly get overwhelmed.
