House…

This is another post about the roughness of my life right now, but then I am done!  For a while anyways. 

Some of you have heard me talk about how our basement is.  With the cement blocks cracking, and the walls are tipping…  Well today I went down stairs to put some clothes in the washer and hang up the load that was in there.  (We have a dryer, but not the right power hook up.  We are pretty sure we are going to have to redo all the wires to hook up the dryer, so for now it just sits in the middle of the basement and gathers soot, and dust, and junk…) I had to take the loads down that were dry, and while doing that I saw this… (Yes I did go grab my camera…) and YES THAT IS SNOW inside the house.  Not just ice crystals like we have seen before, but SNOW.  So then being the wonderful person that I am I went outside with the camera to show you the wall from another angle (take into consideration that it is –26 right now) This picture does a horrible job of showing just how indent this wall is.  What you can see is the wood wall is supposed to be sitting on the edge of the block, like a normal house.  Instead the board (pointed to by the yellow arrow) that supports the whole wall, is falling out.  Just another couple of views of the wall.     When facing the “snow” in the basement this window is about 3 feet to the left.  See how the board at the top of the window is crooked?  That is the board that was pointed out in the previous picture…This is another wall in the basement the back wall of the house.  The cracks are all at ground level and the top part is all leaning out. 

This is what you see when you come down the stairs.  The window and “snow” are on the wall at the end of this one.  This one just started to show a larger crack, but once it starts it has to go somewhere right???

The house was originally built by John’s Grandpa Russell.  John’s dad’s dad.  He built it in the lowest spot that he could on this part of their land.  Plus there are no gutters on it at all, and I have been told that is the majority of the problem…  After Russell passed away, Idella, John's grandma, sold the house to Linda and Lavern, John’s mom and dad.  They added plumbing, and electricity.  The outhouse turned into a shed, and is still in the back yard!  Anyways, they built a basement, jacked the house up after their kids got a little older and they needed some more room, and moved the house back about 20 feet (where they had dug and built the basement.)

We really want to build in a couple of years so we don’t really want to put much money into this house, but I don’t think these walls are going to take much more…  Any tips to get us by until we can afford to build???  Anyone want to come help us fix the problems with this house?!?!?!?