Wood and Water Doesn't Make a Good Seal

It's been a while again. I have new door on my side entrance. I have a new roof above my cellar entrance. Hopefully I'll show the details soon. Now, I'm working on getting windows installed. 

Last night, I tore out the old sill under one of the windows that will be installed soon. As you can see, It was very rotten. Keep in mind this was under the old cellar roof for a number of years. My plan is to cast custom concrete 4"x6" sills to fit right back in the same hole. More on that soon...hopefully.

Losing Myself in Planning

I think when I bought this house, I thought I could get projects done quickly by focusing on one room at a time. I've mostly followed the one room at a time thing, except work that I had to do for renting out my second floor apartment and some yard work. Last night I sat down and started putting together a list of things that need to be done to finish the East Room. 

Now that I'm finished, it feels a little daunting. I may have to get more help on this than I had planned. Not so much that I can't do it, but because I'm living in about 550 square feet and I'm feeling pretty cramped. Also, I'm trying to have something of a life. Anyway, here it is. It should read more like a dependent schedule than an outline.

• Attach Subfloor
• Initial Mason Repair
• Rebuild cellar entrance to allow full access to North windows that are currently non-existent (one is actually a boarded-up door).
• Perimeter wall framing
• Install new North windows & frames and repair masonry around windows
• Install new exterior door & frame and repair masonry around door
• Install new spigot (old one is too low)
• Install new electrical
• Install perimeter wall insulation
• Finish walls
• Install ceiling insulation
• Finish ceiling
• Install floor

Problem Doors

So my goal at the moment is to move closer to getting insulation into my East room. Since insulating inside of a brick wall involves extending the walls four to six inches deeper, this means the door and window frames need to be altered. The doors have an especially big change, since the door has to be on the inside of the wall to open properly. That means I need to build or buy (custom) a new, deeep door frame, since the wall is already nine inches deep. 

Well hello, crawlspace

The other day, I decided to take apart the sill and see what I'm working with. Not picture above is a one inch cap covering the original sill and the front of the cap. From what I can tell, the original sill (show above) cracked at the overhang and they basically put trim over it to make it look better. Unfortunately, the sill plate did not overhang the kick plate that they installed. In fact, it butted up against the kick plate. Any good carpenter will tell you this is going to cause moisture problems behind the kick plate. Any good mason will tell you that trapped moisture and bricks will cause problems.

Bridging Gaps

It's been a while long time since my last post. The Great Laziness set in on me for the winter, then I had to go to LA for a couple months for work. Extended trips tend to leave me in another state of laziness when I get home.
Now, I'm back to being productive in my East room wing. I spent my Sunday installing bridging between floor joists in an attempt to stiffen things. First, I tried the metal single-nail tension bridges. It worked between a couple joists, but most gaps between joists were too wide. I ended up putting a 2x8 bridge between most of them. It helped some, but, like I expected, there's still a fair amount of bounce. Securing the sub-floor and finished floor may help some with that, but most likely I'll install a beam underneath to keep things from bouncing.
If you're wondering about the black strips on the joists, that's roofing felt. It's often used on top of sub floors to get rid of waviness or general unevenness. I decided that since I had a few joists that were 1/8" or 1/4" too low, they could be a good solution to even things out before installing the subfloor.
One thing I need to figure out is how to fasten the subfloors with strips of roofing felt below them. The normal method is to put down construction adhesive and nail the floors down. I've planned on using screws to hold the subfloor down. At this point, I can't decide if that's enough since construction adhesive on the top layer of roofing felt wouldn't do anything. Maybe I'll just break down and glue every layer of felt beforehand just to be safe. After all, it's only 4-8 layers on 5 joists for 13 feet.
Actually, that doesn't sound too bad.
In the meantime, I need to research thermal breaks between the wall and floor's edge and also research putting up new framing for the walls. I've decided that I should frame in new walls 6" from the exterior walls and put in insulation. In other words, I may have this room finished in less than a year and a half, but it might be closer to two.

Designing

I haven't spent much time documenting things lately, but I have been trying to come up with a first floor plan. I've tried a few different things, but this one seems to work the best at the moment. I couldn't get everything to look right, especially around the stairs. Oh, and if the windows look misaligned in the back of the kitchen, that's because they do have a bit of a strange alignment. 

In the current arrangement, this is my bedroom looking through a wall into the living room. I kinda like this arrangement at the moment. 

Maybe things will look like this some day, but for now I'll just keep procrastinating by designing my future interior. Hopefully, I'll get things moving soon. I've decided to hold off a few weeks on the masonry work. In the meantime, I'm going to work on floor leveling and digging out some of the crawlspace. In the meantime, there are more pictures to see here.

Electric Brick House

New hole for switch boxes

I've been working on the house again lately, though still not as much as I should. Over the holidays, I removed all the loose plaster in my East room. Now I'm getting ready to put in new electrical boxes and finish the electrical for the room. Once that's done, I'll probably hire someone to plaster and do the skim coating. Then, the floor and ceiling should follow shortly after. 

Basically, the room had just one electrical outlet. While a renovation doesn't require updating the number of electrical outlets, I want my house to be convenient. I also want to move the exterior light and add a separate switch for a ceiling fan. 

4-Gang electrical box made for masonry

Today, I cut out a layer of bricks to mount the new electrical boxes. Basically, I used a circular saw with a masonry blade to cut the edges, then chiseled out the rest. In the next few days, I'll hopefully get the BX cabling mounted and mortar in the electrical boxes. These boxes are specifically made for mounting in masonry, so as long as I can get the cabling routed, mortar shouldn't be a problem. 

Just an update

So...I got a little busy, then a little lazy, then a little busy again. You've missed a lot that I may end up posting anyway, just a little (read: a lot) belated. To sum up:

•  I finished re-plumbing the fresh water supply in June with a little time to spare before my first tenant moved in upstairs. I didn't take the time to completely re-plumb the upstairs kitchen, since it was much more difficult than other areas and probably won't be there in a few years if everything goes to plan. The house now has good water pressure everywhere  that doesn't drop out if someone else is using the water. The Viega Manabloc was easy to work with and I haven't had any problems yet.



Plastic sheeting and single-bulb hanging lights made it almost easy to work in the area.

• I went on a short camping trip when it was so dry that we couldn't have a fire. We got rained out. I learned that a Honda Element is pretty good for car sleeping when your tent is soaked.
• I learned that air circulation isn't very good on the first floor of my house. I'm guessing that this is a result of some of the original windows having been replaced by boards and a couple others becoming half-size windows. Also, the lack of transom windows and the insertion of walls make it even worse. Some day air will flow freely again. 
• I got lazy with house work for a couple months.
• I finished brick repair (I think) in the East room that I'm currently working on. I also removed a section of joist that had rotted and been repaired using a method that I wasn't comfortable with. Basically, I was able to just lift the repair out without removing any nails or screws. 



Not quite finished in this picture. Water-damaged bricks had previously left a gap in the first brick layer about 2.5 feet wide and 1.5 feet high.

• I went on my first fall color hike in Colorado and found a great trail past Geneva Mountain (not to be confused with nearby Geneva Peak). I basically just used Google Maps' satellite view to find an area with a lot of Aspens, then found a trail past it and hoped I had the right weekend for best color. I did.

• The next day, I went to Modesto for work. I wasn't home much for the next six weeks. 
• Next on my agenda:
• Finish planting daffodil bulbs. I ordered and received 400 bulbs of a few types to plant along the alley, fence and entry sidewalk. I've planted about half so far. The instructions were to plant after the first frost, which I did. I'm worried now because, like usual, Denver's weather can't stick with a temperature. I'm hoping the warmth we've had since then won't damage them by getting them to grow too soon. 
• Re-wire the East room. It needed to get pulled since I took out the original wainscoting and a false wall that covered the back door and window. Also, there weren't many outlets, so I'll change that. The outlet and switch boxes will be embedded into new holes in the brick and channels will be cut for BX cabling which will be covered with plaster. I'm sure the planning of this will expand to a full post later.
• Install new ceiling in the East room. I'm thinking it will just be insulation and a tongue & groove white ceiling. I'm wondering how many holes I'll want for ceiling lights, but hopefully I'll have that figured out by the time I install.
• Re-install salvaged wood floor. Two layers of wood flooring, plus a subfloor and carpet on top of that, were removed from this room in early June with the help of my parents. One appeared to be the original. The other appeared to have been installed sometime later, but still quite old. I believe the majority of the planks can be re-planed and used again. Hopefully I can find matching planks somewhere if needed.

Oh, and I almost forgot one thing. I had squirrels in the attic again. I got some live traps and relocated them to about five miles away. I have a somewhat temporary patch, using hardware cloth, to keep other squirrels out until I go back up and put in something more permanent.