Last week, my wife started ripping out the front porch so she could rebuild it.
Little did she know that it would lead to a few major concerns for our furnace.
She was looking at how the previous owner had stabilized some of the joists. As she ripped the board apart, she realized that the previous owners had been pinned to the foundation. My wife and I were accustomed to bad heat in our bedroom, as well as she was just finding out why. Even though we had wall based radiators in our room, they had been vented into our outside wall. I almost laughed, but my wife didn’t. Our foundation was crumbling as well as there were a ton of ants scurrying everywhere. We have a boiler system to heat the house, and there are water pipes that lead from the boiler to the radiators throughout the home to supply the appropriate heat. When the previous owners added the bedroom on, they did all the pipe work so that it would connect to the boiler, but it somehow ended up just kneeling on the ground. Now my wife and I were understanding why we didn’t have any heat coming from our radiators. Our porch ended up being a rather large reconstruction site because of the crumbling foundation under our bedroom area, because they’d never installed a base floor beneath the bedroom. My wife and I had to rerun pipes which were covered in ants and also redo the new rotting bedroom floor. My wife and I were also getting new pipes to run into the system, so that we could have sizzling water for heat again. A part of myself wishes that my wife never started the porch task.