Moving and renovating

“Moving is a monumental task” tells the story of the Northrop Grumman’s Electronic Systems sector in Baltimore where two of the company’s calibration labs moved to a new building. The building required a complete renovation, which meant planning and constructing walls, wires, and pipes. Like any renovation project, oversights and unexpected problems arose.Listening to the engineers tell their story, I was constantly reminded of my own just-completed home renovation and move. Like the engineers at Northrop Grumman, I too made many changes during the contstructin project because things don’t always turn out like as anticipated.

For example, the doors of the calibration lab open into a hallway, creating a potential hazard if you open a door and someone happens to be on the other side of at the same time. Their solution was to cut the solid doors and install glass windows. That obviously won’t do in a home so we had to change the doors in two rooms to open inward, which meant installing smaller doors to clear objects in the rooms.

In both the cal lab and my home, the contractor wasn’t quite finished on moving day. In their case, the contractor was still running wires and installing floor tiles. In my case, the contractor was still installing kitchen cabinet hardware.

We both moved walls many times. In fact, my house has walls in different places than are on the architectural drawings. Those two doors that had to open inward after we saw the problem when they were installed are among those differences.

Like the engineers, I also found unexpected problems. When we removed the first-floor ceiling, we looked up at the second floor joists and wondered why the second floor hadn’t collapsed. Someone cut 6-in. notches in three joists to run a waste pipe from a bath tub. We had to bolster the joists and we had to hire a structural engineer to design new walls under that bathroom to bear the weight of the repaired joists.

The plumbers installing pipes for the new cal lab unearthed human bones. While we didn’t find bones in the house renovation, we did find an old whiskey bottle embedded in the walls. I’m going to display it.

We both had our share of electrical issues. The cal lab needed some rewiring because the calibration stations didn’t end up where originally planned. In my case, I had the electrician add lighting in the basement, increasing the number of bulbs from three to eight. But, I never thought to add AC mains outlets. Apparently, the previous owners used the lighting outlets to get power.

Every renovation project has stories like these. Add yours below.