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.

Totally Tubular I

Viega Manabloc

This weekend I'm focusing on putting in the new Viega Manabloc water distribution manifold. Over the next week, I should be removing old galvanized trunk plumbing and installing home run PEX plumbing. The first part is getting the manifold mounted. 

Allow me to vent a little...

This started as a test picture, but I like it.

I added some roof vents, among other projects, over the weekend. On my two roofs, which previously had no real ventilation, I installed three inlet Pop Vents and three exhausting Aura Vents. Supposedly the louvers on the Aura Vents create an "accelerated exhaust" which sucks out more air through the Venturi effect with no moving parts. I first looked at them when investigating flat roofs for a previous house I was thinking of purchasing. My roof isn't quite flat, but fairly close. I would guess that it is 2-12 or 3-12. 


My goal was to provide adequate, long lasting ventilation without needing power. I looked at solar powered vent fans, but decided they were far too expensive for my budget. Using the FHA 1/300 rule, I calculated that I needed around 1.5 Aura Vents and 1.5 Pop Vents for the upper roof and 0.5 Aura Vents and 0.5 Pop Vents for the lower roof. I doubted they would have much functionality if I cut them in half, so I ordered 3 of each (2/2 up and 1/1 down) from Home Depot's website. 


The installation was fairly straightforward, though the packages from Home Depot weren't very helpful. I knew they were manufactured by Active Ventilation Products, so I used the instructions on their website. In summary:


1: Cut the holes. I started with a 3/8" drilled hole, marked a circle with a template I made and followed that with a reciprocating saw. The upper roof was a little bit of a gamble. The roof joists ran in such a way, since I can't get in the attic, that I couldn't measure their location. I knocked around and listened for hollow spots to guesstimate their location and cut. I shaved about 1/16" off of two of them. 

My roof has a pretty good view of the downtown skyline.

2: Lay a base layer of roofing cement 

Note: If you work like me, the trowel will probably be so caked that you'll want to toss it afterwards. I found  my pointing trowel good for scraping the sides of the can, but not so great for this job otherwise (and also ruined).

3: Position vent and fasten with nails or screws

4: Seal with roofing cement: After placing an initial layer of cement over the vent flashing, I added asphalt glass fabric mesh to make a better long-term seal over the screws and edges before putting on the rest of the cement. For 6 14" vents, I scraped the bottom of two gallon cans of roofing cement

It's a little ugly, but I think it will stay sealed. I'll check on it regularly to make sure, unless you can see  that I obviously have bad craftsmanship.

Everything took about 6-8 hours over two days. The first day had a record-breaking high temperature in the 90s, so I didn't get much done until later in the day. The second day topped out around 80, which was about perfect for what I was doing. Now I don't have to worry about my attic getting too moist or too hot just because it's unvented. I hope that the squirrels don't come back next year.

Repost: Young House Love's Cheap Blue Stools

These stools are awesome...especially for $39 each. Check them out and how they did it at Young House Love. I think I would have liked the seats to remain cork-looking, but they're still a great idea.

Joisting Match

That's what the last section of boards under my joists looked like. These are two of the chunks I cut out. They look heavily rotted and/or eaten. I think this was all past damage. I didn't see any evidence of bugs in the wood, so if they were there, they've probably been gassed. I also didn't find any water water. Even though it hasn't actually rained recently, I feel that the concrete cap that was at some point placed around the first couple of feet of the exterior walls should keep water out. I've also worked on the grading to make sure water isn't pooling around there.

Now I just need to put this exhaust flue back together and lay brick to fill in this hole. The floating joists are temporarily held up with a couple of jack posts, though I may make them more permanent once I have the new bricks in place. I almost feel like cutting out more of the boards that were rotted away, but it looks like the boards are healthy starting where I stopped cutting. Also, I don't need to spend all my time doing this brick by brick in one room.

Joist For Fun

It seems this can result with unnoticed water penetration. The leaks are long gone, but nobody fixed the results.

Today I worked on getting prepared for some brick work that needs to be done. This is in the East room that is currently torn apart. Obviously it has no floor. Right now the ceiling has been removed as well. While removing the wainscoting, this corner lost some bricks. This morning I removed the fallen bricks, then scraped mortar and vacuumed. 


After that, I could get a good look at the joists in that corner. The last three joists were considerably lower in that corner. I thought I would just sister them and build up the subfloor to flat above. However, after seeing what's in the picture below, I decided to jack them up and make sure they're sitting on a solid foundation. 

Results of former half-hearted repairs.

It might be hard to see in the picture above, but the joist on the left is sitting on two semi-rotten 2x4 boards stacked on top of each other. The middle joist is partially rotted on the very end so that it only has less than an inch on the foundation. The joist on the right was rotted back further so that it almost seemed like it was barely on the joist. 

Now that the joists are raised and sistered, these water pipes will make removing the rotten 2x4 boards quite fun. The pipes are likely to be removed soon for a re-plumbing project. 

Unfortunately, this last joist also has the house entry for the two gas lines drilled through the middle and, therefore, cannot be raised. Considering this, I decided to use raise the left two joists to rebuild the foundation underneath. Another trip to Home Depot and I came home with two new jack posts and three four-foot joist pieces to sister to the ends to make sure they don't slip off. After some post wrestling and cursing in the cellar, during which I had a scare when the right-most joist actually slipped off the foundation, I had two of three joists jacked to level. Next, I sistered the three of them and replaced the subfloor (still temporary). 

Jacked and sistered

Stacking Seats

Free Stacking Seats

I couldn't help myself. After my run the other day, I noticed that someone was throwing out a bunch of seats similar to the Eames stacking chair. After I got home and changed, I drove over and snagged them. There are probably around thirty seats in total with no bases. Most of them are the yellow and green you see here, plus a couple somewhere between yellow and tan. Some have a little damage, but they're mostly intact.

I don't really have a plan for them at the moment, but I felt that they would be wasted in the trash. I might make a couple of yard benches out of them. Perhaps I'll make them stacking chairs so I can have unique dining and overflow seating. I have a feeling that I'll give some of them away, but for now they'll probably be stored in the cellar. At the moment I don't really have time or space for projects such as this.

Canvas & Canvas @ designsponge

I would love to have a chair like this. It's from a designsponge post I just happened to see today. I don't think I could find a base like that and I don't currently have the skill-set to make one. Maybe I'll come up with something to turn one of those into this.

No Termites!

Beats turning the house into a circus tent.

I had found evidence of what I thought was termite frass in the upstairs apartment. After the tech from EnviroPest took a look,  he informed me that I didn't have termites. I didn't even have carpenter ants. It turns out it was just black carpet beetles, which eat keratin. 

Riding Dirty

Free dirt!

After the last rain, which was perhaps the only real rainfall I've had so far, I noticed that the grading around the house isn't sufficient. Luckily, someone in the neighborhood's Facebook group was digging a foundation for a new garage and posted that they had some dirty to give away. On Saturday morning, I went and picked up about four wheelbarrows full in my barely not a compact truck SUV. It was just enough for the space between the sidewalk and foundation in front of my side entrance.

I had to rake and shovel all the annoying landscaping stones that had been used as fill. Apparently someone thought, or perhaps didn't think at all, that a flat flower bed filled with rocks would carry water away from the foundation. After about four hours, I had the old stuff removed and the new dirt watered down.

While picking up the dirt, I noticed that someone was throwing out a decent-sized, hard-shell car roof cargo carrier. I had thought about buying one in the past, but couldn't justify the $400+ price. Later that day, I went back and brought it home. To my surprise, the paint even matches my car. 

There are some holes in the bottom where it appears they had used improper mounts that caused premature stress and failure. I also don't have a key to lock it. I ordered a patch kit to fix the holes in the bottom and I plan on using U-bolts with plates to spread out the forces. 

It is a Volvo-branded box, but I'm guessing they don't actually design or make them. The lock core serial number looks to be a Thule code, so I ordered a Thule lock core removal key, a new core to match my current Thule rack locks and another key. I'm hoping that will take care of the lock issue and I'll have a good cargo carrier for less than $100. It might actually be less than half of that.

Bad Blogger

So it seems that I am one of those people that starts a blog and never updates it. At least that seems to be the case so far. I had every intention of keeping it up to date, but then things got a little rushed. I had a month to do some demolition and re-configuring before I moved into the first floor apartment. I also had to pack and move in that month. To make things worse, I got sick in the last week. On top of that, my tenant for the upstairs apartment moved out a week later. 

I've done a lot of work since the last update. I'll see what I can list off the top of my head

Before, during (with smaller archway shown) and after removing front-room closet.

I removed the closet in the (currently) downstairs bedroom. This room will eventually become the living room...again. The closet had two problems. First, it wasn't very deep. It had one shelf mounted at about six feet high. When combined with the standard height door, this meant that the rest of the wall up to the ten foot tall ceiling inside the closet was not usable. Next, the swinging door took up about half the remaining width of the room when it opened.  To make things worse, it only opened halfway before getting stuck on the floor. 

Behind the drywall behind the closet, I found another hidden doorway. From what I could tell, it was actually an arched door-sized entryway built from an older, wider arched opening. This room has at least one more hidden door to the original front entry and stairway, but if I tear into that, I won't have a separate apartment from which I can make some extra money.

This wall will eventually be removed, so I patched up the whole hole with some large pieces of drywall and filled the gaps.  Since this is in a bedroom I expect it to be less than two years before the wall is removed, I passed on painting it. I plan on hanging sheer, white curtains around the new closet-like configuration to make it feel a little more closet-like and hide the extra paint colors on the wall.

I installed a dual-flush kit in my toilet. While the box claims no tools are needed, what it means is that no tools are needed for the installation. Removing the old hardware definitely needs tools. Still, it only took about an hour to install and another half an hour for adjustments. After using it a few weeks, it seems I need to adjust it more. The heavy flush works fine, but the light flush doesn't always go down all the way. When it works, however, I think it reduces the water consumption to somewhere between half and a third of what it used to use. If I can get it adjusted correctly, I may install one in the apartment upstairs.

I removed the ceiling above the first floor bathroom. I found out that something (I now know it was the shower upstairs) was leaking. A few days later I heard what sounded like a squirrel in the ceiling. I was a bit worried that a squirrel was going to jump out at me, but it luckily didn't happen. Since my tenant moved out, I took extra days in figuring out how to remove a shower drain and installing a new one. Now, I need to re-install the shower tile from the upstairs shower. Apparently there were some cracks that allowed the material underneath to get damp, causing more cracks, etc.

I examined the crawl-space. It was dirty. There were some animal remains that you don't want to hear about. The important part is that the foundation looked fairly good from what I could see. Some joists look like they need to be replaced, but I kinda knew that from the sloping floor in the front room. Another important find was an air duct that was going halfway across the crawl-space to nothing. Apparently I have been heating the crawl-space. Since this duct also ran through the access hole (you can see this hole on the left) and made it difficult to get in and out, I removed it and duct-taped the remaining duct extending from the furnace. 

I patched and painted the bedroom closet in the upstairs apartment before installing new shelving. In this 4'x6' closet with a nine foot tall ceiling, there were only two shelves totaling four feet. I decided to install two six foot wide shelves and a couple more two-foot wide shelves. It bothers me when closets have lots of head room and no cargo room.

That's all I can think of at the moment.  Hopefully I'll keep things up-to-date here.  

Fresh Start

So I didn't want to be one of those people that starts a blog and never updates it, but it seems I'm becoming one if I'm not careful.  I closed about a couple weeks ago with a little over a month to move out of my old apartment.  That meant that I had to quickly do all of the demolishing that I wouldn't want to do while living in it, but I'll get into that later.  If I haven't gushed an explanation to you in person, you're probably wanting to know more about the house.

1. It was built in 1891
2. It is around 1500 square feet
3. It is currently split into two apartments (one upstairs and one downstairs)
4. It has a small basement/cellar with a dirt floor connected to the crawl space for the rest of the house
5. It is located in the San Rafael national historic district

San Rafael is in the Five Points neighborhood of Denver.  From what I've read, I get the impression that San Rafael was built as a middle-class neighborhood.  It's been through some periods, but is doing fairly well now without being over priced.  The house is located about a half mile from the central business district and about a mile from the center of downtown.  Since I work South of downtown, I'm even happier that a light rail station is about three blocks away.  My long-term plan is to return it to a single-family home configuration.  In the meantime, I'm getting extra cash by renting the second floor apartment while I live on the first floor.  

Side addition

I hope the tenant doesn't mind all the extra noise.  So far, I've only been demolishing, which probably isn't quite as loud as remolishing.  I've removed almost everything from the single room sized addition on the side of the house.  I'm not sure what this addition has been in the past, but it was last used as bedroom and a main entrance and foyer for the first floor apartment.  Since I started, I removed drywall to reveal a door and window along the back wall, removed the foyer wall to open the room into one room again, took out the ceiling (it had no insulation or ventilation in the attic space) and removed a few layers of flooring.  It's now down to plaster and some very old, very worn wood flooring.  

Now I have lots of things to think about.  What do I do with this room in the long term?  Is the floor worth saving?  How do I identify wood type in (possibly) 100 year old flooring?  How do I go about leveling the floor?  If I build a porch off the newly found back door, should I rebuild the addition's roof to extend over this porch?  If I rebuild the roof, will I have enough room to install a strip of narrow windows along the top of the ceiling?  Obviously, my mind is running in circles.  I think I'll need additional posts when tackling all of these problems.    

Side addition halfway through the demolition process

2012-02-24

I just bought a house.