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we needed was a new cottage, but none of us could afford that at the time. At a minimum, the chimney had to go, and the cottage needed to be jacked up and leveled.
In the last week of June 1986, Uncle Bill; his son-in-law, Ken Dietzel; Ken’s son, Bill, who was 8; and I undertook the job of taking out the chimney, jacking up and leveling the cottage, and replacing the shed. My brother, Jon, had promised to help, but at the last minute couldn’t make it. Pete Abbott (from the Flowers cottage down the line) was on the island, but he was laid up with a bad back. After looking things over, given the lack of time and diminished manpower, we abandoned the goal of repairing the cooking shed, which at least hadn’t collapsed during the winter, and decided the chimney replacement was the highest priority.
On a sunny day, we started on the chimney with hammer and chisel, two of us on the roof and two others below hauling the bricks away. As the chimney came down, we found the roof boards around the chimney were rotten and needed to be replaced. At the end of the first day the chimney was gone -- in my journal I wrote that the cottage “heaved a sigh of relief” – but a large hole in the roof had been created. As luck would have it, it began to rain. Uncle Bill went back onto the roof in the rain. We passed him a sheet of plastic up through the hole, which he tacked down to cover it temporarily.
Stretching a string taught from the front of the cottage to the back showed that even with the chimney gone, the floor still sagged 51⁄2 inches in the middle. When we found the ground under the cottage was a muddy bog, we abandoned the original idea of crawling under the cottage to the middle to jack it up.1 A better and more direct route to the center joists that needed to be jacked up was through the floor. Not knowing what we were going to find, we pulled up the old, worn, original linoleum flooring and cut a 3-foot hole in the middle of the floor. We found that the 2x6’s holding the cottage up were in surprisingly good condition. The cement blocks that had been put under the cottage in1966 had decomposed or sunk into the mud. With an 8-ton hydraulic jack and a 4-ton screw jack under the joists, we slowly pushed the floor up about 4 inches and wedged in new supports. After we repaired the floor, we took out the cupboard that had once supported the chimney, making room to position the woodstove more centrally, and ran new, insulated metal chimney pipe straight up through the roof. Heat from the stove could now be felt in the dining room. New linoleum went down onto the floor. This repair bought us 10 •years before another major renovation
was needed.
1The cottage, it turned out, was positioned directly over a virtual underground river of water flowing from the higher ground behind the cottage toward the shore.
Webers Webers
22 Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN SPRING 2022