Last week, my husband started ripping the front porch apart so he could rebuild it.

Little did he know that it was going to lead to some major problems for our heating system.

He was looking at how the previous owner had sistered some of the joists. As he ripped the board apart, he realized that they had been pinned to the foundation. We knew we never had very good heating in our living room and he was just finding out why. Even though we had wall based radiators, they had been vented into the outside wall. I almost laughed, but my husband didn’t. The foundation was crumbling and there were large ants scurrying everywhere. We had a boiler system for our heating. There were water pipes that led from the boiler to the radiators in the house to give off the heat. When they added the living room on, they did all the pipe work that should have gone to the boiler, but it somehow ended up just sitting on the ground. Now we knew why we didn’t have any heat coming from the radiators. Our porch ended up being a major reconstruction because of the crumbling foundation under the living room area and that they had never put a base floor beneath the living room. We had to rerun pipes which had ants nests all through them and redo the now rotting living room floor. We also had to get the pipes run into the system so we could get hot water for heating. A part of me wishes we had never started the porch job.
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