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.

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. 

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