Wednesday, June 5, 2013

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.

As you can see, or maybe not since it's a bit dark in this picture, I have some missing bricks. I think the moisture caused the bricks to deteriorate so much that I can stick my arm through the wall and into the crawl space. Now instead of just building or buying a new frame, for which the decision making process is causing me a lot of grief, I have to replace a bunch of bricks first. Here's to stress!

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