Let’s pick up this afternoon with the December 2006 morning room de-flooring, a continuation, really, of the living room de-flooring documented yesterday. This resolve-testing transformation — equal parts exciting progress and viscera twisting anxiety inducer — felt formidable at the time, even after undertaking somewhat similarly ambitious structural transformations in the carriage barn and the icehouse in the months prior.
A yawning, gaping void right in the middle of our house swallowing up hopes, resources, time, deadlines, and any hope of completing the project within our original timeline or budget. Those were anxious times. With each successive deconstruction, we discovered more problems. Setbacks and recalculations had become the familiar refrain. The scope of work mushroomed. We began to lose all perspective. (Source: Sunken Living Room, Now & Then)
Perhaps looking at these photographs (a bit blurry and decidedly dated in comparison to the impressive photographs that we were able to make with our mobile phones today) can convey the enormity and gravity of the venture.
We no longer had any illusion that we were in charge. Rosslyn had, subtly at first, then gradually more demonstrably, asserted control. Far too long neglected to feign patience or demureness, Rosslyn recognized an opportunity. Her fate hung in the balance. Now or never.
And we saw little option but to oblige her. Humbled but respectful, we sought to understand what this home needed. We looked. We listened. We debated and postulated, hypothesized and schemed. We leaned on others for guidance — architectural, structural, infrastructural, construction and deconstruction — in order to sketch and re-sketch a plan forward, some semblance of map for the journey ahead.
Once the living room floor had been removed, we continued into the morning room (aka the “north porch”). The photos in today’s post chronicle that progress. The rotten joists, in many cases consumed with mold (white in the photograph above), were floating.  The joist tails, having rotted away from the masonry walls, hung precariously, hammocking as a whole with the floor boards and but a few jerryrigged supports wedged between the sagging floor and the damp earth crawlspace below. 
The yawning void in these photographs… revealed just how structurally compromised the western ell of the building had been. But it also welcomed new brainstorms, new possibilities for the space that we would be able to recover underneath the living room and underneath the morning room. Because we had to rebuild this space, we actually were beginning to conceive of a silver lining… (Source: Sunken Living Room, Now & Then)
In these photographs, Todd Christian, Doug Decker, and Travis Coonrod bore the unenviable brunt of this laborious, unpleasant task. Deconstructing and transporting the spongy, rotten, moldy lumber took an entire day. But it felt like an entire week! 
At this point, we were still committed to saving the porch roof and exterior wall on the north side of the morning room. But the stone foundation underpinning the north wall was on the verge of failing. Bowed in dramatically after decades, perhaps a century or more, of water roof run-off collecting and overfilling an underground cistern outside the building.  moisture, and probably the freeze thaw cycle more than anything else, had gradually caused the dry stack stone foundation to fail. Morning room, the flooring revealed just how serious the problem was.
Once again we came to terms with the fact that rebuilding would need to be pushed further down the road and more deconstruction, more demolition would be necessary. To move forward, we would once again need to move backward. This had become the recurring theme throughout all four buildings at this point. And though it was generally discouraging, often desperately discouraging, we tried to balance these setbacks with optimism, with brainstorms and what-ifs. yes, further deconstruction was needed before construction could begin, but maybe this dank crawlspace could become usable space?
Perhaps the new foundation we would need to support the north wall could make room for a magnificent wine cellar beneath the morning room? This exciting possibilities became my go-to’s with each successive round of bad news. And so, as the morning room de-flooring once again expanded our scope of work, and not in significantly at that, I began to dream of a wine cellar…
What do you think?