Emergency Repair on House

The Gentlemen of the Gamma Trition charge of Theta Delta Chi at Michigan State have been living at 445 Abbot Road in East Lansing since 2006. The house itself has been standing since the early 1900’s.  The house is located 5 minutes from campus, and is even closer to the local watering holes like Rick’s and Harpers. Abbot Road is one of the busiest streets in East Lansing, so 445 is the perfect place to be on game day in the fall, and on holidays like Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day. The house has 8 bedrooms capable of housing 14 people comfortably on the second and third floors. The first floor has an open layout with a large front room, a smaller bar room, a back room, and a kitchen. The house has a perfect layout for a gathering of East Lansing’s finest Spartans on a Friday night. However, seeing as the house is nearly over 100 years old, things are starting to break down. Recently as a brotherhood we have put a lot of TLC into improving the house that we love so much. We re-did the kitchen and bathroom over the last year, which were both desperately needed. When we returned from winter break this year, we realized that when people entered the front room, it felt like a trampoline. It would visibly move up and down when people walked, or jumped, on the floor. The problem progressively got worse as the weekends passed, and it got too big to ignore. Upon investigation, we discovered that many of the beams that support the floor were cracked, broken and need to be replaced. Usually, we can handle the home improvement. We have survived winter months without heat, stints with no hot water, and many broken doors and holes from the wonderful visitors that frequent our house. We have tackled all previous problems on our own, but seeing as none of us are licensed contractors, we find ourselves in a tough position on this one. The attempt that we made to fix it did basically nothing. Hiring someone to do a job, the labor, and the materials are very expensive and money is tight and as you all know, the bills don’t stop coming. If we don’t get it fixed, we would risk falling through the floor and possibly losing the house. We estimate that the job will cost about $2,500-$3,000. The contractor we spoke to also said the job can be completed in a weekend, so the sooner we get the money the better. We have a car wash planned to raise some money and are also trying to front some of the money on our own. We have all put our hearts and souls into this house, and we want to preserve it for future Theta Delts. We are asking that you help us out with this! Any kind of donation would be greatly appreciated because every dollar helps us get closer to our goal. Thank you in advance!