Jason Cameron: We’re getting ready to make a ton of noise right here on Elsmere Avenue. It’s usually a nice, quite neighborhood but not today. We’ve got a ton of work ahead of us fixing this desperate landscape belonging to those guys.
Tim: We were just waiting for you to show up.
Jason Cameron: You guys ready to work?
Tim and Greg: We’re ready to do it
Jason Cameron: Meet Greg and Tim, cousins who bought this house a year ago. It was a fixer offer to begin with but then things really got bad with high winds associated with Hurricane Ike rolled through and tore up the front porch. Now in this neighborhood of classic looking houses Tim and Greg has become a classic mess.
Here’s my plan for the house as promised we’re going to build a new porch roofs supported by two impressive columns. We’ll pour in new concrete steps and a new walkway. We’ll have three new landscape beds anchored by a 22-foot tall tree and even though this is a small space I'm bringing in more than 50 plants. We’ll be doing all this work in just eight hours.
This is a 90-pound jackhammer.
Greg: This could only handle 85.
Jason Cameron: Well, we’re going to move you tonight, good.
Greg: Look at my girl friend over there.
Jason Cameron: And so you want nice wide stance, so you got a good balance, okay, and you want to keep you’re back arched. The worst thing you can do is to keep bending over then you’re back is going to take a beating. Just always maintain a good arch in your back. Balance yourself and let the jackhammer do the work. So once this thing picks up, a lot of power here you hold on to it and then just move it around to the next section that you wan to break off.
Greg: Let the machine do the work.
Jason Cameron: So right now I’ve got Rick Davis attaching the ledger board to the house. This is the most important part of the roof structure it’s going to carry half the load so he’s using an impact driver to drive the logs used into the framing.
We are about two hours in to my ridiculously ambitious plan we’ve got some rafters going up. The old steps are almost gone. The new steps are ready to come in. We’ve been putting our rails now for the concrete. This is the form for our new steps. It’s actually five feet wide and a foot and half wider than the old steps.
Now it’s really important when pouring new steps and putting it up to an old porch is the connection point. You don’t want these new steps to pull away from the old porch. Now to do that we could just create a cavity in the old porch, when we pour the new concrete in it will invade this cavity and keep the two together. It will secure it, that’s really important.
So far so good, the concretes in much better, I mean you’ve got a huge staircase. I mean what you had before was pathologically desired and now you’ve got five feet entrance right up the front.
We’re well on our way with the roof structure. We’re putting in the sheaving on now, were getting ready to put the shingles on. We’ve got a 23-foot three that we wrestled off the truck, on the Bobcat into the hole got it up right around the wires, we’ve got nine bars going and we’ve got a bunch of other plants going in all big stuff.
Greg: They got about an hour or so to go. It’s coming together. They are also working on the paint, got the guys finishing up the roof.
Jason Cameron: What’s going through your mind?
Tim & Greg: I can't believe that we live here. It’s gorgeous.
Jason Cameron: So this morning out of scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best what would you give it this morning
Tim: I would give it like a two.
Jason Cameron: All right. Now from a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best
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